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Plans you're not supposed to talk about

dynomight.net

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Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#421

Post by pdonis »

vkou wrote: post #324
chii wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All revolution does is put a different group of people in charge than previously. The outcome could be good bad or ugly. Look at the iranian revolution. It has not resulted in a better outcome at all. In fact, most revolutions of the modern age has resulted in somewhat of a worse outcome for the citizenry.

> In fact, most revolutions of the modern age has resulted in somewhat of a worse outcome for the citizenry. 'Most' revolutions of the modern age were anti-colonial revolutions, in places like India and Africa, in the aftermath of WWII. Life under colonial rule in those places was, as a rule of thumb, not great. We then had a large string of revolutions in Eastern Europe, in the late 80s/early 90s[1]. Would you also…

> We then had a large string of revolutions in Eastern Europe, in the late 80s/early 90s

And the most salient fact about all of those is that they were hardly even revolutions. The Soviet Union stopped supporting its puppet governments in those countries, and the people of those countries, who had been more than ready to quit Soviet rule for quite some time, just did it. No fighting was necessary because practically nobody in those countries wanted Soviet rule anyway. This has been true for few if any other revolutions in history.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#422

Post by lazide »

KeepFlying wrote: post #394
csours wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The good form is protective, the bad form just normalizes something that is common at the time. Is there any particular reason a woman cannot lead a prayer? Is there any particular reason why we exchange work for money? Is there any particular reason why not to eat pigs? For each of those, the answer may be yes or no depending on your time and place. The reason yes or the reason no may also be different.

Except many of those do have reasons, those reasons are just outdated or immoral or context dependent. The statement doesn't mean to keep the status quo, its meant to encourage tracking down the "why" before tossing things away. If a society says to not eat pigs you can't just decide to one day toss out the law. For all you know the pigs of that region are infected and will make you sick. Throwing away that status qu…

Yup. The issue of course is that there are many false positives for ‘why’ that can also result in it being thrown away to great suffered - and many folks who frankly don’t have the time to spend.

Best one can do is where it clearly gets in the way of doing what YOU need to do, try to tear it down, but with one look over your shoulder to see if anyone is coming to get you for doing it.

If they do, they at least feel a need to keep it, even if nonsensical to you.

If no one does, then apparently no one remembers or cares enough to keep it there, so entropy wins and put it goes.

Might be a mistake, but might not be - and at least your problem will be easier to solve, which you concretely know and can experience, which is something.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#423

Post by AtlasBarfed »

The Global Warming one was weak. The inherent contradiction in modern life is that you participate in the economy as part of "modern life".

But that is unquestionably leading to a future such that if this were coalesced to a single (rational) person and telling them they will certainly get painful, awful cancer if they do X anymore that any sane person will stop doing X.

You can't change the sheer inertia, and even if you did, there is a powerful set of people (this would be, say, the part of the brain addicted to a drug that will kill you with painful awful cancer) whose influence over society is far more powerful.

So you either become an "edgelord" and pick rational sanity but everyday life is so bad it is functionally insane, or you go along with the flow and pick rational insanity, but everyday life is a lot better and therefore really the sane choice.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#424

Post by toast0 »

imgabe wrote: post #355
noisy_boy wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What it will do is that when those people who haven't got the shots start to be sick, they will throw their beliefs in the bin and go to the hospital. They will stretch the capacity and then when I need to go for an ailment different from this disease, I'll be queued up behind them and the treatment I get would be subpar. Disclaimer: I don't have the stats on hospitalization rates/capacity in places that have low rat…

That is a concern, and I think we need to be much louder and angrier about why, 2 years into a pandemic, we still haven’t built up additional hospital capacity that we know we need. There are also other treatments that we know greatly reduce the severity (and thus would decrease the need for hospital capacity) that haven’t been rolled out as widely and aggressively as the vaccine has.

> we need to be much louder and angrier about why, 2 years into a pandemic, we still haven’t built up additional hospital capacity that we know we need.

Hospital capacity limits are mostly about personnel and not equipment/space. Equipment and space are issues too, but temporary measures are possible.

Everywhere is having trouble hiring because employers don't want to pay enough wages for people to do the work. The same is true in the healthcare setting, but nursing requires a significant amount of training (AFAIK, 2 years for entry level nursing, I think more time needed for ICU nursing) and doctoring is even more. Hospitals (and healthcare providers in general) are not incentivized to retain enough staff to deal with spikes in demand. AFAIK, there hasn't been increased training, and probably a lot of training was delayed while in-person education wasn't an option. Healthcare workers were also a lot of the early victims. COVID mitigation measures probably reduce healthcare productivity too, requiring even more workers.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#425

Post by AtlasBarfed »

danblick wrote: post #83

The author presents the idea that "you may be born into a culture with social practices that you don't understand but that work for your benefit; they may work better if you don't understand them!" I find this idea a little repellant, but it's something Friedrich Hayek wrote about too. (In my mind Hayek is the person most associated with distributed knowledge.) ~"You may not understand the forces that have led societ…

How does ingrained racism line up with that reasoning? Um, not too good. How about ingrained wealth inequality? Not so great. Or, as I already harped on elsewhere, how about an economic-industrial system structured in such a way that your future is looking quite bleak and the people currently charged with its control have no incentive to change it because they'll be dead when the consequences come to roost? Really not great.

Yes there is a sort of institutional logic, or at least an evolutionary path to some sort of functional structure to the world that often isn't obvious. And individuals, almost always blind to hidden forces and instincts of self-preservation and improvement of their survival/control of resources, may not see how civilization-level structures "work" for the whole if it is bad for them.

But let's not pretend that the conservative cultural view is a good one. Slavery was clearly immoral, evil, exploitative, bad bad bad. It took the bloodiest war in US history to dislodge it and move to a slightly less exploitative, explicitly oppressive, slightly less evil structure of society.

Between global warming, species extinction, habitat destruction, general plastic/industrial waste pollution, and the like, there are so many aspects of modern regulation-resistant lobbying-paralyzed capitalism-imbalanced civilization that you can't argue that it's "good" or even "sane". The world as it is structured now is insane and suicidal.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#427

Post by underwater »

ravel-bar-foo wrote: post #368
underwater wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The differentiator between conservatism and progressivism is whether you seek societal change. If you believe that change should happens incrementally then you're a progressive. The examples you've given just sound like branding.

I think the point of GP is that one can seek change, but seek it slowly and carefully. Presumably GP would take a position in favor of "reform the system" over the platform of "abolish the system", which is popular among Progressives today. Whether this is actually what Conservatives believe (or rather, what percentage of them believe it) is debatable, but I could see this sentiment actually being widespread enough t…

My point was that the definition of progressivism is, literally "support for or advocacy of social reform", while conservatism is "seeks to promote and to preserve traditional social institutions." If you want to see social change, then you're progressive. How you think that should happen -- whether it is measured or radical -- is secondary.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#428

Post by vineyardmike »

salt-thrower wrote: post #230
mherdeg wrote: post #54

Reading this gave me a kind of horrifying idea that goes something like: You know about a deadly disease whose most serious outcomes can be avoided by getting a shot. Many members of a group in your society have decided they don't want to get the shot. You are annoyed by the way they talk about a lot of things, including the way they talk about avoiding the shot. They, in turn, call you "smug" for the way your group…

What's the difference between: A) smugly telling them to do it so that they won't do it, and B) genuinely telling them to do it because you care about public health, but they interpret it as smug? Also, the kind of reverse psychology you're describing generally only works on children.

> What's the difference between

How and who says it. A in a patronizing and rude way, B in a way they respect and understand.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#429

Post by vineyardmike »

imgabe wrote: post #304
jhanschoo wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you catch the flu once your immune system remembers it and can easily deal with exposure much better, but this memory fades in time. Your immune system isn't perfect either, and there are breakthrough cases, and this is more frequent in the elderly, albeit frequently milder. The vaccine offers protection similar to catching the flu (albeit much better in the case of the mRNA and J&J ones ( I'm disappointed I'm exp…

I know all that. I can fully accept that the vaccine doesn’t make me invulnerable. I have the vaccine and am fully prepared to go back to living my normal life while accepting that I still have some risk. I don’t think that forcing other people to get vaccinated further reduces the risk to me (which is already very low). At least, it doesn’t provide enough of a benefit to offset the costs of removing freedom. Dying f…

> I don’t think that forcing other people to get vaccinated further reduces the risk to me (which is already very low).

It objectively does... the hospital capacity risk, the risk of variants spreading among the unvaxed, or the breakthrough cases.

> At least, it doesn’t provide enough of a benefit to offset the costs of removing freedom.

That is an opinion not all agree with.

> Dying from Covid is more or less optional at this point.

What about "long covid"? That sounds also miserable.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#430

Post by dehrmann »

andrewflnr wrote: post #381
themodelplumber wrote: post #371

Nice job author :-) > You secretly guess that the group is sustained by a minority of true believers who make up critical mass for a larger group of people you, but you never talk about this and neither does anyone else. When you have kids, you feel weird about explaining your thoughts about all this to them, but you don’t parrot back what the religion says when you’re talking about the meaning of life either. Bahaha…

> I've been in cult leadership Um, wow. Do you want to talk about that, or have you written about it elsewhere? No shade if you don't, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who would be interested.

This could just be managing an Apple store.
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