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>Elite private education in America is on the cusp of this new era. The controversies over free speech, safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggressions and the like are symptoms of this shift. . . Once the transition is complete, the “correct” side of the controversies will become central to a school’s identity. . .

This post from Instapundit earlier today just seems apropos: Prosperity breeds idiots

" At the start of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel <em>In the First Circle</em>, a Soviet diplomat on home leave in Moscow tries to make an anonymous call to the U.S. embassy. His purpose: warning the Americans of a Soviet theft of atomic secrets. But he gets a dull-witted, indifferent embassy staffer on the line, and the call goes nowhere. Or almost nowhere. The call is monitored by Soviet security. Arrested and imprisoned at the end of the novel, the diplomat’s final thought about Americans is that “prosperity breeds idiots.”

Solzhenitsyn’s diplomat channels views that were clearly held by the author himself. Comfort and safety, enjoyed too long in the West, invite complacency—and complacency leads to stupidity. As a gulag survivor, Solzhenitsyn had a barely disguised disgust for Western elites with little experience of political murder and repression. Nor could he abide the legion of fools who seemed fascinated, from a secure and prosperous distance, with socialist thought. "

There's massive disagreement over what is, but it stems largely from a tug-of-war over what should be. People ferociously dispute scientific research that contradicts their "ought" views, from every angle. As an example from a closely related topic, the book <em>The Gendered Brain: The new neuroscience that shatters the myth of the female brain</em> is explicitly and dramatically presenting a factual disagreement.

Political disagreements, in any subject, lead to genuine and fiercely contested factual disagreements.

Any idea why the TV show Jeopardy seems to have been largely untouched by the culture wars? I hope I'm not somehow jinxing things by mentioning this, but it seems to be entirely unscathed thus far. And it would make a prime target, since the tweets practically write themselves. Imagine:

> the show pays a old white man $10 million a year to oversee a game show which gives millions more each year to players who are disproportionately white and male, rewarding them for answering questions about dead white males...

Cherrypicking numbers to back this up is trivial--using a snapshot of data from J-Archive, we can see that the five most common historical figures asked about are:

1. George Washington
2. Ronald Reagan
3. Abraham Lincoln
4. Thomas Jefferson
5. Napoleon

(These are not the most common answers, just most the common historical figures. The most common answers are all geographical entities, because Jeopardy loves geography. I also didn't bother trying to combine different forms of the same name.)

Similarly, Jeopardy has asked a total of 15 questions in the category "African-American Literature", below both the 234 in "American Literature" and 95 in "English Literature", and even below the 20 in "Animals in Literature". (The latter does not include the 5 for "Kitty Literature" nor the 5 for "Elephants in Literature")

Amusingly, Jeopardy actually had a &quot;Stay Woke&quot; category in a game once. The clues were all related to literal sleep and waking.

I have no clue why Jeopardy seems to have escaped notice at time when the Culture War has expanded to include knitting and razors.

I own a hardcover copy of Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology. It is not a great book but it is of pretty substantial historical importance given the way that the phrase "cultural Marxism" has gotten memory-holed.

I was going to buy a copy for someone who expressed an interest in the book--my thought was, "it's an ancient book nobody cares about, I bet I can get an old library copy for next to nothing."

Imagine my surprise to discover that the ask on a paperback is over $100, and over $500 for a hardback...

>I, along with many others, have been concerned about Trump's behavior here. Gary Brecher has been shouting that the long-awaited betrayal of the Kurds is upon us (to be fair, he's said that before several times).

I don't have anywhere else to share since no one in real life knows who Brecher is so this sub gets to be subjected to my random factoids.

My girlfriend was reading a horse training book. Knowing these type of communities I was sure there are people who hate Monty Roberts and his methods, and that interested me for some reason. One of his greatest nemesis is John Dolan, they have hated each other for decades. I google John Dolan and my mind is blown to find out that John Dolan is Gary Brecher's real name.

TLDR: The War Nerd has been in a decades long feud with my girlfriend's favorite horse trainer.

I'm pretty agnostic on the whole thing (I don't believe these claims generally, but I wouldn't care if they were true). But I'll add extra scrutiny for Carroll because of her book:

https://www.amazon.com/What-Do-We-Need-Men/dp/1250215439

> As seen on the cover of New York Magazine and in the breaking news story about Donald Trump

I know that accusing the President of rape is passe, I know that using news media victimhood to sell a book is passe, but indirectly advertising the news that you've been raped as the blurb for one's book seems lends the whole thing a tawdry air (if it didn't have one already).

I mean, I get it, yeah, I voted for Trump knowing he was vulgar, I shouldn't expect anything different from him or the media or anyone else involved. But too many of these stories have a quality of feeding the trolls. I understand why Anderson Cooper cares, I understand why I'm supposed to care, but why should I actually care?

I'd strongly suggest picking up a copy of Models for your buddy. The book tends to be honest, insightful, and offer lots of actionable advice for building a romantic connection.

The reason I hate the Nazi analogy, besides the fact that it’s overused, is that it just is not apt. 1920’s Germany was pro-Jewish, only compared to other countries. Being anti-Semitic was not a career ending move and plenty of people in power vocally hated them, even if something like Holocaust was not on their mind. People should actually learn something about early Nazi history before making this comparison. Even if they weren’t popular before right before their rise to power, they were considered more like rabble rousers, not pariahs. I recommend The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard Evans to get an understanding of what led to their assuming and consolidating power.

>They don't want territorial expansion

The fact that they steal so much and spy so much indicates that it's possible they haven't formally expanded due to a practical reason and not an ethical reason. Yet they're already heavily influencing Africa and, more frighteningly, Australia. The Chinese influence and population in Australia and New Zealand is rising so fast (already 5.6%) that military invasion would be a amateurish blunder; they're already getting what they want at a slow and steady pace.

On the macro-scale, end the "drug war". Massive decriminalization of all sorts. Our legal code is a massively overgrown nest of bullshit that criminalizes every single person in the country not currently in a coma. For a rundown of the more egregious corners of this, read "Three Felonies a Day".

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On the technical side, a massive increase in the number of police officers, judges and public defenders. Reduction or removal of immunity for prosecutors and police officers. Reduction or elimination of most fines, and channel the money from fines to the public defender's office.

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Ban plea deals outright. Disincentivize prosecutorial overcharging.

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If I really want to get into the weeds, I recommend public shaming/corporal punishment as a substitute for minor jail sentences and fines. I believe it would be more of a disincentive and more humane to the criminal at the same time.

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The ideal system I would like to see would have massively frontloaded resources. Actual crimes (as opposed to silly bullshit) would be investigated with the zeal and manpower of a federal task force. I'd want to see clearance rates in excess of 90% across the board. I care a lot less about the punishment than I do about finding and convicting the maximum number of criminals. In the short run (say, the first ten years), this would massively increase the prison population, but over time it would shrink it. Something I recall from a criminology class was that the harshness of punishment had little correlation with deterrence effects, but the likelihood of apprehension was strongly correlated.

This is a good Youtube: "How Rwanda is Becoming the Singapore of Africa"

Israel is another interesting point of comparison, obviously.

BTW, the Igbo are another group which have been called the Jews of Africa and which have been persecuted.

... the morbid side is that, had they actually wanted to run a fact-based analysis describing bad policies that had torn apart countless African-American families, specifically tried to break their wills as a policy decision, and lead to massive amounts of non-consensual same-sex rape of African-American men, it's not like it'd have been hard to set up a timeline of the 1980s+. Like, say what you will for prison policy over the last five decades, but there's reasons you had The Godsdamned Trumps consider the result to be a bit too much.

But that's not really the point of Tariq Nasheed.

The man's best known for his twitter personality, and you touch on this a bit from where you mention his low opinion of BLM, but it's worth pointing out that the man's also basically a glorified Pick Up Artist. Take it any more or less seriously than that, and you're missing the point.

I'm reading The World Remade: America in World War I right now, and one of the things that opponents of the League of Nations worried about was loss over immigration control. Well, looking at the UN and all of these refugee treaties we signed, that turned out to be 100% correct.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/being-single-in-your-30s-isn-t-bad-luck-it-s-a-global-phenomenon

>For women, changing behaviors and biological imperatives are leading to a material imbalance, which tends to be felt once they’re ready to start a family, and can’t. This is at least in part because of some expectations and behaviors that aren’t changing. From relatively conservative, predominantly Muslim Indonesia to nominally liberal America, it’s a widely accepted norm that women marry men with as much, if not more, education than themselves; men who will earn equal or higher salaries, and be the main household breadwinners. This isn’t necessarily right, but it’s deeply ingrained, connected with traditional ideas of masculinity, providing for a family, and protecting it, that are hard to shake. (There’s even a term for it: hypergamy.)
>
>... (earlier)
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>This kind of waithood can hit young men hard: A youth bulge across large parts of the world, high rates of unemployment, and low wages combine to hold men back from relationships (especially in places where high dowry payments are expected), and therefore from starting families.

> Are you arguing that because previous presidents have committed ethical violations and gotten away with it that we as a society should condone unethical behavior?

Selective prosecution is generally considered wrong, so all presidents should be held to the same standard. It would be very wrong to impeach a president for actions that were completely normal for most people, but which were technically criminal. People supposedly commit 3 felonies a day. It would be wrong to impeach a President for these kinds of crimes.

> I think this is an over-reading of what seems to be basically a propaganda documentary.

Agreed, this entire thread seems to fly in the face of everything I’ve read about how China actually operates, rather than how they portray themselves too foreigners. ‘Whats wrong with china’ by Paul Middler is probably the best summarisation I’ve read on this topic. I’ve never read or heard about the Chinese particularly valuing hard work in the sense of doing something that’s difficult/complicated/time consuming in order to enhance the quality of your work. Being able to do hard work as in work that’s physically intensive, uncomfortable, and/or dangerous on the other hand they do value. The belief that foreigners are weak and Chinese have a naturally stronger constitution is a common one.

Even in the west, it depends enormously on context. Vern Bengtson has been running a longitudinal study of faith transmission over the past 35 years and touching on four generations, and he concludes that the overall inheritance of faith has been stable at approximately 60% since 1970, but higher for evangelicals, mormons and jews and dramatically lower for the mainline protestant denominations, who seem to be the source of most of the growing "nones" category that Robert Putnam described in 2011. This still sounds like it's bad for religion, but remember that "none" is a category of parental faith as well - which means that a fraction of children raised in secular families turn to religion as adults, and the "prodigal" phenomenon of adolescent wandering followed by a return to the faith in adulthood is common.

I do expect the "nones" to increase into the immediate future at the mainline protestant denominations continue to secularize, though this growth curve is likely to flatten as the baby boom echo of the millennial generation enters middle age and the prodigals begin to return. The evangelical churches seem to be stabilizing with the assistance of immigration and will likely persist well into the future when reproductive competition becomes more of a factor.

Finally, the God Gene may have been a bit overblown, but religiosity as a personality trait is unequivocally heritable in part (as are other personality traits), with limited twin studies indicating an approximately 40% heritability in adulthood. If reproductive trends persist into the future, in the long-long term, society may undergo a genetically determined shift towards increased religiosity.

What got me thinking about it again was this kid from the CW thread a couple weeks ago, and how alien the concept of an edgy right-wing teenager seemed to me. It made me feel out of touch, and wonder what's brewing out there on the random Minecraft servers and such of the kiddie internet.

How the UK's Online Safety Bill threatens Matrix

> The proposed bill aims to provide a legal framework to address illegal and harmful content online. This focus on “not illegal, but harmful” content is at the centre of our concerns - it puts responsibility on organisations themselves to arbitrarily decide what might be harmful, without any legal backing. The bill itself does not actually provide a definition of harmful, instead relying on service providers to assess and decide on this. This requirement to identify what is “likely to be harmful” applies to all users, children and adults. Our question here is - would you trust a service provider to decide what might be harmful to you and your children, with zero input from you as a user?

(Matrix is like a decentralized version of apps like Discord / Slack)

> The various atrocities of the 19th and 20th century that were committed by Westerners and the guilt they have instilled seem to be the main driver to me, combined with the cultural influences of Christianity (I think the social justice movement is just the post-religion version of Christianity), which is a religion and philosophical system that preaches conciliation, peace and repentance.

This thesis, that Christianity is basically the air that everything in the modern West breathes, is the basis for <em>Dominion</em>, by Tom Holland. Highly recommended.

> We pretty much all feel like something's fucked, we just don't know how to fix it.

What boggles me about this feeling is that human beings have never had it so good. Evidence that "something's fucked" is shockingly thin, unless it's evidence that what's fucked is people's expectations, and the whatever-it-is-we're-doing to give them those expectations. There is definitely suffering out there, there are winners and losers, and it is difficult to hear that "the world is better than ever" when you're the one whose ship never seems to come in (so to speak). But ideologies built on the idea of impending apocalypse are at least as ancient as Christianity, and they historically appeal to society's worst-off for precisely this reason--this feeling that "something's fucked."

I call that feeling "the human condition." It's okay to want to make the world better. And we should definitely do that where we can. Following that feeling is how we built the amazing world we live in today.

The trick is to also be grateful for the amazing world we live in today, too. It's possible to do that and still want to make things better. It's that gratitude, I think, that staves off a tumble into nihilism--which I suspect is a much better name than "socialism" for what the teenagers calling themselves "socialists" today are feeling.

When I read this book, The World Remade: America in World War I, I learned that there was a period of over a month where the President was essentially an invalid and unable to govern. Nobody really knows who (if anyone) was running the executive branch of the government at the time. The accepted theory is that it was his wife, but nobody knows 100% because everyone with knowledge of it took the secret to the grave. This was also during one of the most important times in American History when we were deciding whether or not to join the League of Nations. Crazy stuff with huge implications.

Back in the 1950s, certainly, some women who wanted to work in professional jobs were prevented from doing so based on a combination of social pressure and employment discrimination.

Today, as Elizabeth Warren extensively documented 15 years ago, many families struggle to make ends meet with two incomes, when their parents and grandparents made do with one. The result is that many women who would prefer to stay home with the kids instead are forced to enter the workplace due to economic pressure.

It's not at all clear to me that the feminist revolution has led to any decrease in the net amount of coercion exercised on women. It has simply changed who is getting coerced and what they are getting coerced into doing. It's entirely possible, depending on what percentage of women would prefer to be stay-at-home moms, that the net amount of coercion has actually increased.

1. Two anonymous sources within the administration is hardly the same as a "rumor." A rumor has no source at all, other than some guy at the bar.
2. The sources are not anonymous. They are two officials who requested anonymity from the reporter. That means the reporter knows exactly who they are. It is not like the Times got an anonymous phone call.
3. There is nothing wrong with saying it reflects badly on the president if he does these things; the operative word is "if."
4. Pardons are forever, so if backlash causes Trump to decide not to pardon war criminals, then yes the Times does deserve a pat on the back. If they can prevent a potential injustice, they should remain silent? Why? To protect the feelings of the President? He's a big boy.
5. Speaking of remaining silent, has the White House claimed the story is inaccurate? No, it has not. It has instead admitted it is true, but that Trump might be reconsidering. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-pardon-accused-war-criminals-revisit_n_5ce885e7e4b00356fc218db8

Fascinating write-up. Thanks.

You asked for book recommendations — I don’t know of any other collections of oral narratives offhand, but this book drove home what a weird and utterly foreign culture the antebellum south was: Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South.

Except that the Court expressly held otherwise in Heller, holding that "militia" at the time meant simply all adult males capable of bearing arms (an argument btw which i first heard from a liberal in a book I highly recommend: https://www.amazon.com/Americas-Constitution-Akhil-Reed-Amar/dp/0812972724 )

Has anybody here heard of Michael Malice before? I hadn't, but apparently he has a new book called "The New Right: A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics".

Most reputable sites haven't reviewed it, but Tyler Cowen over at MR seems to like it, going so far as to say "it will go down as one of the most important books of the year". His post piqued my curiosity, I'd be interested if anybody here had read it and could chime in.

Those Amazon reviews do seem a little suspicious though.

>except in that it's about me trying to get away from the Culture War in my real life

I think we need more of these kinds of posts.

Anyways.

You might be interested in reading Journeys of Faith, which is a set of essays from people that converted from one form of Christianity to a distinctly different form (Evangelical to Orthodox, for example) and then a rebuttal chapter on the theology from someone representing their original form.

I also suggest Rod Dreher's writings on Orthodoxy; that is only one (great) example and you can search for more.

I say this next bit as a believer that is not settled yet into a home church but comes from a Protestant (specifically Stone-Campbell Movement if you enjoy American Christian history) background: look for a liturgical congregation. The rhythm of liturgy is something sorely lacking in most Protestant traditions and they are only realizing it now. Especially for someone that's looking for a church for cultural or "self-care" purposes more than a matter of faith, I think that rhythm may be part of the key you're seeking.

And even as a non-Catholic (currently) I would suggest a Catholic or Orthodox church in part for the, as my family put it, "smells and bells" and in part for the tradition of meditative prayer (something else many Protestants forgot and are only now realizing the cost).

I suppose I just don't see his behavior as that of the mindless arsonist and critic. He did try to sincerely make a good game. A niche one, to be sure, and I'm quite certain it wouldn't be to my taste, but nobody makes an Atari 2600 poetry game decades after the console faded from relevance out of cynicism. Nor is the arsonist likely to write a whole book on transferring the joy of games to life. Again, I don't think that book would be thoroughly to my taste, but it strikes me as nothing if not sincere.

As he said: he liked Goose Game. He'd better like games in general, given the amount of breath he's spent praising them and the time he's poured into development. He seems to be genuinely looking to analyze what is remarkable in gaming and apply it elsewhere.

Creation is absolutely harder than destruction, and it sends a much more meaningful signal. That strikes me as a point in Bogost's favor, not against, whether for creating his first game as a labor of love, creating and then destroying a popular entire game just to make a point, or writing a positive book on games as a whole. His works aren't always my style, but they do seem to be about as genuine as creative work can get, and that's my primary request of a creator.

Here is my 31 part game theory YouTube series, and here is my game theory book at Amazon. My lectures notes are not polished enough for me to be willing to make available.

>I have no doubt that in this case someone would develop an algorithm for setting up such lists that just so happens to yield the output that the Google employee would have manually chosen.

An Equation of Almost Infinite Complexity

You might enjoy this book. One theme is about laundering information into and out of complicated systems.

> I find it maddening when other progressives claim that we aren't anti-family or anti-marriage using various borderline (sometimes outright) disingenuous arguments and gotchas. We should be out and open about our anti-family stance and proudly proclaim that destruction of the family is a cost well worth paying to get rid of all the social stigma and shaming that caused and continue to cause suffering.

Honestly, this feels like a strawman of your own side. Progressives do not accept the factual claim that the inevitable consequence of their social policies is "destruction of the family", full stop. Progressives believe that their own concepts of family formation can be universalized. For example, if you look at progressive opposition to abstinence-only education and "purity culture", the objections can generally be translated to "these ideas make it harder for people to successfully enact the blue family model" (as in, they increase the likelihood of premarital pregnancy and STI transmission).

I think it's true that progressives do not always appreciate the barriers to this universalization (in particular, the message I took from Promises I Can Keep is that gender-egalitarian relationships may be a "luxury good"). But you seem to be saying that progressives should just give up on the project, and if they don't then they're being intellectually dishonest.

This all sounds correct to me.

Miller is gunning pretty hard for a particular kind of poly configuration, one with a committed primary partnership and rotating secondary partners. One problem is that this seems like a much better fit for men's average-case sexual preferences than it does for women's. In particular, this argument of Miller's does not sound like a realistic account of most cishet women's preferences to me:

>Polygyny makes it harder for lower-mate-value men to find partners, but polyamory actually makes it easier, because these guys don’t have to be good enough to be a woman’s primary partner.

As Regnerus observed, gay male sexuality resembles straight male sexuality, and lesbian sexuality resembles straight female sexuality. So it's not a coincidence that Miller is citing the popularity of Dan Savage's "monogamish" norm among gay men, as opposed to lesbians, as a model for straight marriage.

> Coming out in 1981, it clearly didn't coin or even popularize the term

It is not clear to me where the term was coined, though many sources point to Trent Schroyer's Critique of Domination (1973). But it takes time for books to be written and published. To hit print in 1981, Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology would have of necessity been penned as the movement was most ascendant, making it an invaluable primary source on what the phrase meant to the people who adopted it, however briefly, as a label.

> I've noticed out of print books with little demand can be extremely pricey just because of their rarity.

Of course rarity makes a difference in price, but so does demand. I'm not an aggressive collector but I have spent a little time buying rare, out-of-print books (both novels and academic works), including some pretty hard-to-obtain foreign language editions. My experience is that this one is a pretty weird outlier. It's not the most expensive rare book I own (I think that honor currently goes to Aetherco's Further Information), but it is definitely up there. Academic works can be fairly precious but the demand is typically pretty low and university libraries often sell unpopular works at substantial discounts. I rarely have to pay more than a couple of dollars for out-of-print academic volumes, provided I don't care about edition or quality (beyond "readable").

Big discrepancy? I see a range from ~$50k in low cost-of-living states to ~$70k in high cost-of-living states. Seems like splitting hairs, considering that the value contributed to society by the typical teacher is less than zero.

>Why do you need price discovery? It mostly regulates efficient allocation of resources. I've seen really avowed socialist claim this isn't anything a sufficiently advanced computer couldn't do.

You should read Jesús Huerta De Soto's book: <em>Socialism, Economic Calculation and Entrepreneurship</em>. It's been a few years so hopefully I'm remembering correctly but it makes a detailed case against the idea that the calculation problem could be solved by computers.

A different CW take could be discussed

>The man charged with throwing a 5-year-old boy off a third-floor balcony at the Mall of America told police he was angry at being rejected by women at the Minnesota mall and was "looking for someone to kill" when he went there last week, according to a criminal complaint filed Monday.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/man-threw-child-mall-of-america-angry-women_n_5cb5bbd5e4b098b9a2da2fe1

I think the Buzzfeed article is deliberately vague to the point of being misleading about her collaborator.

From Parental Discretion Advised around 6:30: >The primary reason that vaporub boy, my best friend and only collaborator, got a job editing for Anthony Fantano, was because of communication that took place in this comment section. He was my age at the time, so he wouldn't have had the opportunity with the new policy.

That would place an upper bound of 17 on his current age, if this happened when he was 14 and she was 11.

It's also far from clear that he shares the political views that are getting her in trouble from her current videos. Her older material is vulgar but lacks the political bent.

> In this case, it feels even more scummy because it's not the parents but (from what I can tell) some random /pol/ internet friend.

I see this exactly backwards. Parents have a lot of power and ways to influence their children. Talking to some random person on the internet isn't much different than passively consuming media. It's like claiming South Park exploited children.

This could be an interesting read:

Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

For several years I have been doing cold thermogenesis where I went from taking cold showers, to cold baths, to ice baths. I've recently decided to expose myself to heat stress. I wear a sauna suit + two layers of shirts and long pants while jogging when its 80F+ outside. I'm careful to avoid dehydration by always holding (and often drinking from) a bottle of water. The theory is that my body is anti-fragile to temperature. I'm a healthy male in his early 50s. Does anyone have reason to think what I'm doing is dangerous and will shorten my expected lifespan? I'm desperately trying to live long enough until technology can reverse aging and I'm hoping to not have to rely on Alcor, my cryonics provider.

If you are looking for a Google Search alternative (addressing censorship, transparency, privacy concerns), Brave Search got released yesterday:

https://search.brave.com/

HN discussion

This is basically a random spitball guess, but I'd wager that most of the people here have an affinity towards Materialism/Fanatic Materialism, with the rest being generally an even mix.

I just picked it up, and for my first game, I'm playing a hereditary, fanatically materialist, militarist imperium with a landed aristocracy and a focus on robots. (Whether I go full PURGE THE XENOS actually depends on who the xenos are. This is my first game, and I want to keep my options open.)

Also, in the time-honored tradition of tossing a grenade into a conversation without stopping to care where it lands, I'm gonna go ahead and link this.

If you're the kind of nerd who cares about such things, level up and use cvim. It its very configurable, and takes efficient, mouseless vim-style interactions to the browser.

There have been a number of studies on N95s. One good one is this: https://www.authorea.com/users/421653/articles/527590-ffp3-respirators-protect-healthcare-workers-against-infection-with-sars-cov-2?commit=e567e67501cd6ee0dd1a6e8e4acdf2c4fd70e0ec

This is with FFP3s, which are the euro equivalent of an N99, one step above an N95, but this study shows 100% protection for hospital workers.

Another datapoint is just the sheer number of hospital workers in covid wards that didn't get covid from Feb-Dec 2020. Most of these workers were wearing N95s, and were being exposed to covid every day for months.

Those followup questions feel like they deserve more depth than I can go into. I know Ayers' history from looking him up during the 2008 campaign culture wars. The usual recommendation is Days of Rage, which hasn't actually made it's way to the top of my To Be Read list yet.

Hi there, what do you make of this critical article on Urbit (and discussed at lobste.rs)?

Urbit seems to have a bad rep in the tech community; so I'm curious how general users perceive it, as well as what its future holds.

As I understand, yes. There is a good summary here:

https://reclaimthenet.org/odysee-overview/

> The LBRY network’s decentralized, open-source, blockchain-based structure solves many of these problems by reducing the power LBRY Inc., the company behind LBRY, holds over Odysee users and adding more transparency to the platform. > > [..] If Odysee ever does start to implement more aggressive censorship measures under [their content moderation] rules, anyone in the community can take the code and create a client that doesn’t censor as broadly.

I've used Thera-Band Flex Bar to pretty solid results on my golfers elbow with only one exercise. Seriously a few minutes a week in two weeks it was gone.

I leave it at my desk at work & use it when I feel flare ups coming.

Yours sounds more chronic so might not be as immediate, but it seems to work for everyone I've read use it.

/u/EdenicFaithful /u/udfgt

I think this fits: https://www.gwern.net/The-Melancholy-of-Subculture-Society

What you call 'original context' is just local (geographically) culture.

The thing is, for many global culture (Internet) is their original context. Until recently I didn't really grok what do people even mean about different cultures (within developed world). Now I think these are definitely real... for some people, usually depending on their age. There are young nationalists and such, but they're mostly part of the global culture too; it's just a superficial meme.

> But they haven't, and the open secret is that the internet is a terrible place to have these conversations. It is rife with toxicity, lacks any ability to ground the self in reality, and consistently results in horrible non-conversations that would be a nightmare for anyone to have IRL.

If you try to hold political or cw conversations IRL, it's even worse than online. If you want to talk about pretty much anything else, not personal - well, on the internet you can, easily, because pool of the people willing to discuss any given topic is obviously larger than you can find within a Dunbar number of people.

Or take political "debates", IRL. Are they better discussions than could be had in a Reddit thread? With inability to cite any data, fleetingness, time constraints etc?

I'd look at this instead https://www.amazon.com/Revolt-Public-Crisis-Authority-Millennium/dp/1732265143

It's not a critical review, but perhaps the best pairing I've found for Jensen is James Flynn's What is Intelligence?, which productively wrestles with a number of the same ideas from a much less hereditarian angle. I found each book more useful in light of the other than as a standalone.

Although inefficient, I had a good run with gift cards for my mother for things like a trip to the nail salon, or a massage or spa. Most people that age ought to have most of the "functional" things that actually matter in their lives, so routine or less-routine luxuries are sometimes easier.

Alternatively, I recently bought a 6-pack of battery powered, motion sensor LED lights to stick in certain annoying areas around the house. It's been a few weeks and I still grin like an idiot every time light just happens when I would have wanted it, without even having to think about it.

>urbit uses UDP, which is not compatible with tor.

Compatibility isn't easy, but it is <em>possible</em>, and I expect more people will be working on making it easier as (UDP-based) HTTP/3 takes off. I don't know of anyone applying this method to Urbit, or what that would mean for Ames' security, but it's at least possible.

> Unfortunately, most countries practice bad economic policy, partly because the IMF / World Bank / rich country economic advisors got things really wrong. They recommended free markets and open borders, which are good for rich countries, but bad for developing ones. Developing countries need to start with planned economies, then phase in free market policies gradually and in the right order. Since rich country economists kept leading everyone astray, the only countries that developed properly were weird nationalist dictatorships and communist states that ignored the Western establishment out of spite. But now the economic establishment is starting to admit its mistakes, giving other countries a chance to catch up.

Scott, bless his soul, stays true to Quokka-speak, but I can't not suspect a Straussian reading here.

Also reminds me of Biden's attempts to create an «alternative to BRI with its debt-traps».

> this seems like a lot of work unless I already know cad software

Inkscape is hardly more complicated than Paint. You don't absolutely have to go for the complicated stuff like OpenSCAD.

> A good book-length argument in this in is Patrick Buchanan's "The Unnecessary War".

Good to know—I'll add it to my list. I was cribbing mostly from Hoover, but he focused much more on the US and WWII specifically than the broader context you discuss here. He lists his own set of blunders:

> Roosevelt's recognition of Soviet Russia in 1933, the Anglo-French guarantee of Poland in 1939; Roosevelt's "undeclared war" of 1941 before Pearl Harbor; the "tacit American alliance" with Russia after Hitler's invasion in June 1941; Roosevelt's "total economic sanctions" against Japan in the summer of 1941; his "contemptuous refusal" of Japanese prime minister Konoye's peace proposals that September; the headline-seeking "unconditional surrender" policy enunciated at the Casablanca conference in 1943; the appeasing "sacrifice" of the Baltic states and other parts of Europe to Stalin at the Moscow and Tehran conferences in 1943; Roosevelt's "hideous secret agreement as to China at Yalta which gave Mongolia and, in effect, Manchuria to Russia"; President Harry Truman's "immoral order to drop the atomic bomb" on Japan when the Japanese had already begun to sue for peace; and Truman's sacrifice of "all China" to the Communists "by insistence of his left-wing advisors and his appointment of General Marshall to execute their will."

Sounds like they're in the same school of thought.

What are some (non-self-help) books on human condition that does not exclusively focus on cognition at the expense of affect?

One book that fits that description is Jaak Panksepp's The Archaeology of Mind (it is a sequel to his former book titled 'Affective Neuroscience'), but I'm curious about others.

I'm not sure this is a small-scale question. What's your scope for "news" and what's your scope for "events today"?

I'm not sure if there's a shortcut to understanding why everything today is happening, but I do think understanding why the world looks like it does today is important. To that end, I might recommend reading books on history, geopolitics, etc.

I recommend How to Hide an Empire, for an explanation of the US's history with colonialism, and the material conditions and technology that enable the US to have a "pointillist empire" instead of a traditional empire today.

Then pair that with a book like Prisoner's of Geography, which tries to explain the geopolitics of various countries.

His book Bronze Age Mindset was reviewed in the Claremont Review of Books by a former White House advisor, so that might be a good place to start.

Same please. If you don't publish episodes to the rss feed, I can't load the podcast in my podcast app.

This is a topic I've often thought a lot about, but don't have near the personal experience you do with it. So I have to ask...

..in the 90s, the main cultural imperialism influences were twofold: Baywatch and Star Trek. Mostly because that's what had been translated.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-baywatch-unknowingly-changed-the-world_b_3891368

(baywatch: 148 countries, 44 languages)

So is Baywatch still a thing over there? And do you think that Baywatch may have been the crack in the dam that led to what we see now?

33C and 90% Humidity is normal in Houston in August, and it can spike to 40C for several days in a row without fanfare.

For reference, this compares Houston to Stockholm.

IMO the hard part is that you never really get a break, it only gets down to ~27C at the coldest middle of the night in August.

Well, if you read the quote in the grand-parent comment, someone can "take the code and create a client that doesn’t censor as broadly" (ie. include CP). Odysee the company would not be responsible for their content (and they wouldn't host it themselves).

I don't know much about the fine details beyond that. I will have to read up on the LBRY spec to understand how all of this works under the hood. Or you can just drop by in their Discord (last I interacted there, they were very helpful in explaining things to me).

Decentralization in mass communications (which blockchain, among other things^1, enable) is new to human history.

^1 For an example, see the section "How does it work" in https://matrix.org/ (See also https://element.io/ if you want user-facing chat software that is decentralized; people host their own Matrix instance to interact with others; unlike Twitter, there is no central party that can censor; you can get banned from individual rooms by room admins though).

Private Internet Access claims that they keep no logs and that seems to be true, though I'll note that their client won't run on Windows 7 anymore if you're still stubbornly clinging to 7 like I am.

> Homemade iced tea is another option as long as you can keep your inner Dixie in check and sugar content low.

My recipe:

• Grab a 2-quart pitcher
• Fill with water, add half a cup of roasted barley (my choice; you'll want a teabag or a cheesecloth bag, I've been using these but obviously you'll need an alternative; note that the 3.5"x2.75" bags are not big enough for this, you're looking for something more like 3.5"x6")
• Toss in the fridge overnight
• Next day, empty the liquid into a 4-quart pitcher, and top off with water. Dispose of teabag.
• Drink barley tea from 4-quart pitcher.

If you want to be a little more efficient you can actually get a second steeping out of the teabag; fill the 2-quart back up and put it back in the fridge for a few more days. Coincidentally, I've found it's ready at about the time when I finish the 4-quart pitcher.

I've analyzed it (or at least started to analyze it) at https://www.notion.so/The-Cure-for-COVID-19-e052c9d829d34bc49eb6a2e1d2ad8e63 .

My conclusion is that this is definitely not the "crime of the century", but there's some merit to investigating Ivermectin better.

My armchair psychiatric analysis is that something about the recent COVID origin controversy in the media has gotten Mr. Weinstein off-kilter.

A baked "fried" chicken sandwich (show me one deep fryer in a school and not an industrial oven filled with manufactured frozen Tyson breaded patties) once a month is hardly an unhealthy diet. After a month of eating tuna salad and shitty turkey sandwiches the least you could do is treat kids with a chicken sandwich or a pizza day once a month.

Looks like a PB&J sandwich is the entree for mozzarella stick day. The obesity crisis is about portion control more than "you ate one baked chicken patty one time." They banned sodas in school (I was so pissed in 6th grade when we could finally get a Coke and they banned it, but it was probably for the best) and that is one of the largest drivers of empty calories.

I'll agree that breakfast is unhealthy, but name a "breakfast food" that isn't packed with carbs, cholesterol, and calories. One cup of powdered egg (357cal) and one pancake (64 cal/oz) with syrup (220 cal) is over 600 calories. At least you get milk with cereal?

Are you referring to https://www.amazon.com/Characteristics-Games-George-Skaff-Elias/dp/0262542692/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2RZSSBC6B9KB0&amp;dchild=1&amp;keywords=characteristics+of+games+elias&amp;qid=1624623987&amp;sprefix=The+Characteristics+of+Games+%2Caps%2C224&amp;sr=8-1

and https://www.amazon.com/Winning-Ways-Your-Mathematical-Plays/dp/1568811306/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&amp;keywords=Winning+Ways&amp;qid=1624623899&amp;sr=8-2

Here it is.

https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Arts-Rationality-Updated-Digital-ebook/dp/B07ZGHS73F

Apologies in advance for the crazy font, I was in the middle of an extended mushroom trip when I wrote the book, so it may come off as a bit wacky. Chapters 2 and 3 basically explain the high level stuff about memetics and game theory, but Chapter 4 has all the practical Dark Rationality tips, like how to manipulate elections and make money off of irrational crowd behaviors. (I made 115% returns on the stock market last year using these techniques, so I can vouch for them personally.)

Well the people making AGI are pretty interested in slavery and its political derivatives. They're big on countering discrimination and ensuring that algorithms come to politically correct conclusions.

>The OpenAI researchers have avoided this problem by starting with a fully trained GPT-3 model. They then added another round of training, using reinforcement learning to teach the model what it should say and when, based on the preferences of human users.

>To train InstructGPT, OpenAI hired 40 people to rate GPT-3’s responses to a range of prewritten prompts, such as, “Write a story about a wise frog called Julius” or “Write a creative ad for the following product to run on Facebook.” Responses that they judged to be more in line with the apparent intention of the prompt-writer were scored higher. Responses that contained sexual or violent language, denigrated a specific group of people, expressed an opinion, and so on, were marked down. This feedback was then used as the reward in a reinforcement learning algorithm that trained InstructGPT to match responses to prompts in ways that the judges preferred.

See also: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/RealToxicityPrompts%3A-Evaluating-Neural-Toxic-in-Gehman-Gururangan/399e7d8129c60818ee208f236c8dda17e876d21f

Everything is connected to everything else.

>' - basically we decide to let them fill the role they want to and treat them accordingly, to a lesser or greater extent

Yeah but the extent depends in large part on how much an individual 'passes', namely reads as being someone of their preferred gender.

>but society can decide how to assign them and this is a valid way.

No, social constructs don't work like that. To take a politically neutral topic, take the word 'inflammable'. The dictionaries and the intelligentsia agree that 'inflammable' and 'flammable' are synonyms, but a certain portion of the population reads 'inflammable' as 'non-flammable'. Therefore if you really want to put a warning label on something that is liable to burst into flames, you should label it 'flammable'.

For another, more historical example, the Victorian John Stuart Mills, in his famous book, On Liberty, noted how nearly everyone in England professed Christianity but didn't act according to its creeds. To quote:

>He has thus, on the one hand, a collection of ethical maxims, which he believes to have been vouchsafed to him by infallible wisdom as rules for his government; and on the other, a set of every-day judgments and practices, which go a certain length with some of those maxims, not so great a length with others, stand in direct opposition to some, and are, on the whole, a compromise between the Christian creed and the interests and suggestions of worldly life. To the first of these standards he gives his homage; to the other his real allegiance.

Social constructs are mysterious in their formation. But it's pretty clear it's not just a matter of society decides, and then it happens.

Rationally speaking the rich are a bad food source -- there are not very many of them and the biomass per capita is relatively small, as they tend to be slim and old.

"Eat the poor" on the other hand, would be interesting to explore, but I think it's been done.

You totally should! It's short! (And free!)

Obviously there are many other influences on The Baroque Cycle, like The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1788), the actual lives of Leibniz and Newton, and so forth. But the (mis)adventures of Jack and Eliza in particular, as well (in a sort of roundabout way) as the tendency of the dead to rise in order to advance the narrative, are such fantastic callbacks to Voltaire, it would be a shame to miss them. In fact I am not aware of Stephenson ever explicitly naming Candide as an influence on the work, but the thematic and narrative overlaps are far too extensive to be a coincidence.

French philosophers, especially mos and pomos, are notoriously obscurantist, making it difficult to find what's there (and, it's easy to point out, it can also serve to cover that there is no there there).

As an amateur and dilettante to the field of philosophy, I suspect most value of the French postmodernists is in signaling to a specific group that you're part of the "in crowd," like edgy teens reading Nietzsche, or so the interview at the above link suggests. If there is a there there, it's probably been analyzed and discussed elsewhere, clearly, and thus there is little need to wade through the cruft.

>And if anything ties these people together, it's that they are genuinely good people who are raising a bunch of kids and like to mountain bike and hunt and ski. Point is, they aren't playing the 'meritocratic gauntlet' game because they don't care-- they're living fulfilling, productive lives.

I think you bring up some good points that highlight some oversights in Greer's piece and reveal it as incomplete. I think it's important and revealing to recognize that he might be writing from a particular bubble, but that doesn't necessarily make his point wrong.

To "win" the meritocratic gauntlet, one first has to play the meritocratic gauntlet- those genuinely good people living fulfilling, productive lives have chosen the Wargames Solution. That leaves it open to those that aren't genuinely good and do not lead fulfilling lives, and care about nothing more than the next metric of "winning," whatever that metric may be. For the classic, you have Burke's “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" or for the sci-fi fan, Douglas Adams' "We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win."

I think Greer's bias towards particular locations (and an associated group/class) is useful to discuss that there does exist a group that wants to win that gauntlet for the sake of power (or if you prefer, their personal non-local/anti-local system of ethics). It's not just about being THE BEST, but THE BEST that also want to win. THE BEST that don't share those priorities are irrelevant in many ways. Those super-duper smart, good, happy, fulfilled South Dakotans are great for South Dakota, but how do they compare to the equally-or-slightly-less-merited globalist FAANGers when it comes to influencing the bigger picture?

> actual "Islam is the religion of peace" comments

For whatever it's worth, Lifehacker has been doing a series on Islam, with posts like "Here's what jihad really means!" or "Here's the true meaning of Sharia!" So they're still around, but I'm not sure of the ratio.

Curiously one can buy that splitter for 20 bucks on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Matrox-LFH-60-DUAL-Multi-monitor-Millennium/dp/B000WL3W8Y

Not that I'm suggesting it -- maybe if you build a retro-workstation?

I think you are misinterpreting the whole point of the AIER article.

To start, AIER is not a news organization. They are a free market think tank.

Next, Phil Magness (the author of the article) is not a journalist. He is an academic historian, author, and researcher at AIER.

The 'author' part is important here, because Phil Magness has specifically written two books on relevant topics. The first is the The 1619 Project: A Critique, and the second is Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education.

If there was ever a desire for a new edition of either of those books, with new evidence, then this incident would fit for both.

The purpose of the article was never to present an unbiased account of events. It wasn't even written in support of Sweet. It was more of an entry into an accounting log of a long and ongoing conflict between the author and the progressive wing of the AHA. In that sense I agree with your original point, that it is a bad article for presenting as a top level link.

> How do we get a well researched book or class about COVID in March 2020?

This one is pretty good. But it might not contain whatever specific piece of forbidden knowledge you're looking for.

> Current events at all?

Why are current events more interesting than invert phylogeny, or the geological history of the American continent?

If that in particular is the part that interests you, you might want to read up on elite theory and the "Machiavellians" as James Burnham calls them. A lot of forgotten but extremely useful insights in there. Now that I think of it, if Goldstein were real, he would be quite exactly an elite theorist.

Burnham's own book on the the topic is really good, but some academic/youtuber recently released a short and to the point summation of the ideas of the school and each thinker as <em>The Populist Delusion</em>. Definitely worth a read if only as an introduction.

Bone up on design patterns and principles of refactoring. This will help you get better at identifying crummy code and how to clean it up, and should give you some foundational knowledge of what reusable code looks like. It'll also teach you some considerations and tradeoffs you'll deal with during design and implementation.

Also, learn how to use Git effectively. You'll be handicapped without at least a working knowledge of a basic workflow.

The popsci mirror neuron theory is mistaken - understanding and learning generally can happen in many contexts, and don't require special "mirror neurons". https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Mirror-Neurons-Neuroscience-Communication/dp/0393089614 (not endorsing the content of the book generally)

As a fun thought experiment: Would a neural network agent have "mirror neurons"? It'd have to respond to/understand the behavior of other agents, so it might end up with some that act in a similar way. But these wouldn't be "mirror neurons" in any special sense, they'd just be parameters like any others. In particular, their relationships to other neurons are contingent, and one can easily understand that the way one feels pain is similar to the way that a cow or insect does, while still wanting less of the former and more of the latter - similarly, one can understand that both the water in your body and the water in the pot are ... water, while boiling the former, yet not the latter.

> In this passage, Polly realizes (because her mirror neurons fired in sorrow and pain when his face scrunched up) that she’s brought up something painful to the boy she’s just met, and wishes she hadn’t because she herself wouldn’t like it if someone did that to her.

this is, again, a progressive/christian moral claim dressed up as neuroscience and psychology - monkeys (which surely have "mirror neurons" if we do) are more than capable of ripping apart other monkeys (or prey animals) despite said mirro rneurosn.

I highly recommend Harold Bloom's book Against Empathy, whose audiobook I listened to some time ago. It goes through some varying definitions of "empathy" and comes out in strong favor of a certain type of empathy that the author calls (I think) "cognitive empathy." A pretty good starting point, I think, for trying to get a handle on what people mean when they talk about empathy.

For CW issues, I think "empathy" in practice just means "favoritism for people I like, stated in a way that sounds noble," no more and no less. Most people don't even know that that's what they mean when they say it, but I've noticed that it fits better than any of the more common meanings of "empathy" in basically every situation in which one encounters it.

You're being legalistic, but you are a federal felon too. Everyone is. The only difference between you and Trump is the fact that the FBI wants Trump and they don't want you. When everyone is a criminal, waving at the statutes is meaningless. Justice becomes a political act. Only those disfavored by the powerful get investigated or prosecuted.

Wouldn't the law need to be amended for it to be properly legally binding? If a court rules that the plain wording of a law should be ignored because it makes no sense in context, is that then considered legally binding?

I'm thinking of a law in my state that accidentally banned slingshots (like, Dennis the Menace). The story goes that the law was intended to ban <em>slungshots</em>, but a clerk mistyped when copying the bill, and everyone in the New Jersey legislature has just accepted that and rolled with it for the last 50 years, even though it was completely unintentional, literally just a typo, but that's the law and Amazon refuses to ship me a slingshot to give to my son.

(So I bought him a crossbow instead, out of sheer spite.)

So do judges have the authority to make rulings in this sort of a case, where the literal Read As Written interpretation is just nonsensical, which would then become precedent, I guess, and thus more binding and important than a casual agreement to not allow an absurd outcome?

Reminds me of a joke: Why do we need libraries when the sum total of human knowledge is contained in these 2 books?

Definitely. All jobs fall somewhere on a spectrum between "I hate every second of it and actively feel it destroying my soul, but it pays well" and "Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life," n'est pas? Lots of men choose not to maximize their monetary outcomes in favor of a job they enjoy more, it isn't a gendered experience, outside of that narrow subset of married women or like old school aristocrat Sloane Rangers.

When OP says "I’ve never known a man who was able to pick a job just because of the hours or to choose a fun job over a money job." I'm thinking, have you never met a rock climbing gym route setter? Or anybody in a bar band? Or a forest ranger? Or an author? Or any variety of artist?

Could you point out a few examples of such egoist philosophies? Most theories that come to mind, don't advocate self-interest by itself, rather they assume it as axiom and then propose specific institutions to coordinate egoistic individuals into producing common good.

Chernyshevsky suggested Rational Egoism. He argued that, since all people are self-interested by design, the only thing we need is to help them become rational, because rational pursuit of self-interests would by necessity eliminate all malevolent acts. (Dostoevsky famously denounced this reasoning)

Textbook microeconomics assumes purely self-interested agents, and benevolent state-actor, imposing markets and institutions from above to maximize welfare.

Interestingly, some thinkers argue that self-interest assumption doesn't survive the evidence. Glen Weyl and Samuel Bowles among others.

Finishing up Criminal Shadows, written by an academic who worked with law enforcement to develop methods for profiling violent criminals based on their actions during each crime. Pretty interesting, less lurid than you'd expect for the subject matter (like I said, written by an academic) though there are def gruesome moments. I remain somewhat skeptical of profiling as a reliable investigative tool — it's not very deterministic, as much art as science. But I've always been fascinated by the psychology behind violent crime. The predator sub-class of humans is somewhat alien and yet so familiar — driven by pride, shame, and anxious ressentiment like the rest of us.

Link: https://www.amazon.com/Criminal-shadows-Inside-serial-killer/dp/0006383947

I recommend pairing this book with Why They Kill by Richard Rhodes and/or Meditations on Violence by Rory Miller (one of my all-time faves).

> How do you debate someone who believed that the president of the United States was a secret Muslim?

Point out conduct inconsistent with such an idea. Which still is pretty scarce.

Look, I don't think Obama is a secret Muslim, but I do think he genuinely is a racist who hates white Americans, and he's never taken a substantial action inconsistent with that belief. Obama governed far to the left of the American populace and this was largely covered up/covered for by the majority of the media, and solely reported by "right wing media" which is something less than 10%.

What, exactly do you think right of center sources should be doing differently. Is Tucker supposed to ignore that books like this exist and were considered a major strategy of the Democratic party going forward?

>Imagine if the Democratic nominee for President, later elected president, was constantly hinting that Bush plotted 9/11 and the Republican Party covered it up, offering zero evidence in favor of this other than pure speculation and dark hinting. And he never went back on that, not for the next decade or two.

We have that guy, he is Joe Biden. He launched his campaign on the premise that the Charlottesville fine people hoax was real. The governing principle of his administration is pretending that a riot enabled by Nancy Pelosi's incompetence at commanding her police force is the most important even of the century.

I remember his thesis back when it was new and was all the rage, and I remember thinking how insane it was even after the first time I read it. Fortunately for him, he’s at least an honest scholar who owned his project as a now deceased failure, out in the open.

I don't think that's quite right. At least this book, when I read it, claimed that women were less likely than men to support the Nazis in elections before 1932 (they supported the conservative-nationalist-monarchist DNVP instead), but more likely in 1932 and 1933 elections, as Nazis were rising to power or in power.

Sure, my point is just that I don’t see why there should be such a constraint on the facts that you can input which arises from “not fitting into science/math,” but doesn’t also apply to moral claims. Whence the specificity of how that restriction is applied?

Also, there is a lot of existing philosophical literature on what makes for personhood and plenty of theorists defend the view that being a human organism is necessary and sufficient. For example, Eric Olson is probably the most prominent advocate of that view, e.g. in this book. So you don’t actually need to adopt a soul view to think that personhood begins at conception. And it’s not clear to me why his view should be more controversial than a soul view, since his is at least compatible with physicalism.

Weights are definitely the most efficient way to build strength and muscle. If you don't have a lot of space, a set of adjustable dumbbells and a foldable adjustable bench that can go in a closet when you aren't using it will not take up much room.

Another alternative that might appeal to you more is yoga. It will definitely not give you huge muscles or the strength gains of weight training, but it will improve your functional strength. It will also make you more flexible and can be very relaxing. It's probably ideal to start in a studio but there are many youtube channels with good videos like Yoga with Adrienne.

>The actual physical impacts of people clearly matters

In many ways, yes. To me, in some ways, no. A person could be on the other side of the galaxy. I still want them to prosper and not be tortured. Yet they cannot impact me or this society without breaking the laws of physics.

This old SSC article comes to mind: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/burdens/

I don't full agree with it, but this line sticks out:

>humans don’t owe society anything. We were here first.

This hypothetical doesn't just treat humans like we owe society. It treats humans as if they are owned by society. That society can tradeoff the well being of people it doesn't want, for the well-being of people it does want.

Its hard for me to further describe how backwards this all feels. Imagine me talking about what product I want to buy off of Amazon with your money. You say "hey that isn't your money to spend". And I say "yes yes, whatever, what is a dollar anyways? but you have to admit that this flash light has quite a lot of lumens and it would be really useful in the dark."

I feel like I can't adequately describe how wrong it is to take a Straussian reading of Caplan on this topic (or really any topic).

If you don't believe in something you quietly say what is needed and studiously avoid the topic most of the time. You don't write a whole damn book on the topic.

This is a Professor who wrote "The Case Against Education".

He is openly an anarcho-capitalist.

He is friends with Robin Hanson (who still has a job at the same University as Caplan, even after pissing off way more people multiple times).

I also want to say that in general not taking people at their word for their professed beliefs is an anti-pattern for good discussion.

If someone says "I believe X" and everyone responds "you don't really believe X" then you can't really have productive discussion about X without first resolving whether the person actually believes it.

Caplan doesn't actively use this forum, but if you were accusing another user on here of the same thing you are accusing caplan of doing then I believe it would represent a rules violation of this forum.

If you're curious about the history of dating and relationships, I can't recommend Labor of Love by Moira Weigel enough. Maybe I'll write up a book review because this book seriously changed the way I viewed dating and each page has another "what the fuck wow I had no idea".

> Yeah, just for perspective - the less-extreme version of this claim is 'consummated' at 12. Juliet is canonically 13 in Romeo and Juliet, which doesn't stop highschools around the country from acting it out every year.

This is a reach. Mohammed is the paragon to Muslims, his actions provide the timeless moral guide to right-thinking Muslims. Orthodox Muslims reject Augustine's argument that what was allowed in one time is not necessarily allowed in another time, because Mohammed is the Seal of the Prophets, he is the last in the line there can be no further information provided by God for clarification afterward. And Aisha is Mohammed's favorite wife, their marriage is incredibly important. It's a moral lesson that is not excisable from the rest of the Muslim tradition.

As Elliot Engel told me when I was but a child tragedy is all about someone doing something tremendously stupid, and by no means is Juliet a model for intelligent or moral behavior. Romeo and Juliet have everything at the beginning of the play, except that they are told "Marry anyone, except [Romeo/Juliet]." What do these two bright young kids choose to do?

To say nothing of, big difference between a 13 year old girl choosing to have sex with a teenage boy, and a 12 year old girl being sold to a powerful warlord by her father.

> The "battle royale" idea basically sounds like the military, except without the benefit of having the violent individuals mostly kill external enemies.

Most criminals are not fit to serve in the military in any way. See, e.g. McNamara's Folly.

> Unless you’re arguing that LGBT identification itself is what enables predators, which i find hard to believe.

Why is it hard to believe? The Catholic Priest scandal was overwhelming % homosexual predators. On top of that, most of the predators had been predated on themselves, indicating that its likely that without Man-Boy predators male homosexuality itself would evaporate to nearly 0% of the population.

>The examples I’ve seen make the news have been discussing the fact that gay people exist, which is not inherently sexual any more than discussing straight people exist.

This is not what is banned by the Florida bill that the left and the LGBT community freaked out about. It is clear that their own perception is that they need to be able to indoctrinate children to maintain support and keep up numbers. Its very similar to the freakout regarding Great Replacement Theory. Its actually a good thing! Until bad people notice what you are doing.

> It matters how far it is from sort of modal local community sentiment AND how alienating it is to those members of the community.

The thing is, these conflicts are being fought between particular parents and the school boards or departments of education in their districts/states. Those boards are elected locally, the DoE is appointed at the state level (in all cases I'm aware of) by democratically elected governors/legislatures.

We have a democratic method by which to make these curricular decisions. In cases where a properly elected school board chooses to do so, I don't think it's a real issue for them to remove books, and the equivocation of "banning" with "removing from the shelves" is kind of silly; although one of the best books I read from my middle school library was Nam, and I still haven't forgotten a lot of it, which was not age appropriate and I didn't understand at the time the way I should have.

But if the upset parents don't win local school board elections then they don't represent the modal local community, they represent something like a heckler's veto. And I think we can agree that the idea that every book that offends a single student's parents in the community should be removed from the curriculum/library is unworkable.

What I am against is elevating all this to culture war shit, for either side, so internet assholes from New York and Russia and Ireland can jeer at the blue hair SJW librarians or the toothless Scopes Trial Hicks who (can you BELIEVE it?!) shelved/banned such and such a book. I'm not sure local democracy can work under those circumstances.