Calamari

[Kristian Niemietz @K_Niemietz]

When it comes to building stuff, we shouldn't make the perfect the enemy of the good.
This is fine. It won't win an architecture prize, and you wouldn't put it on a postcard, but there's nothing wrong with it. We should build millions more of those.

[The Alt Hyp @thealthype]

I don't know what you're going on about.

There was no resurrection because people don't come back to life after being dead for several days. There were no miracles. I don't get what a "probability analysis" related to the resurrection story could be, since the probability is zero.

Really what's interesting about carrier's work is the development of the Jesus story from a space battle with satan across the 7 heavens, and how Jesus the Angel defeats satan by sacrificing himself, similar to the various dying and rising god stories in vogue at the time.

If you want to point to "some guy whom the jesus stories were based on", well, then that's not "Jesus the Christ", just some guy named Jesus with a mystery cult. Again he could be an embelleshment of a mystery cult leader of any name and that argument wouldn't be any weaker or stronger.

[The Alt Hyp @thealthype]

"Grindset" people have made a major error. They have confused how to individually behave to strive versus what is best for society overall.

For you individually, perhaps it's best to have a workaholic mentality in terms of making money. Maybe doing that got them great rewards.

But a society full of workaholics is just South Korea, or the worst parts of Japan. The idea that it gets you more cool stuff hasn't seemed to pan out.

As an individual, your relative value as a workaholic is highest when people around you are lazy. You should seek to actively exclude other workaholics. Saying "lets bring in more workaholics" just makes you less special, and raises the expected level of work.

From a policy standpoint, it's beyond stupid as a long-term strategy. Economic development doesn't come from more efficiently utilizing existing technology, it comes from improving technology. Just compare agricultural yields from the 1950s to today. No amount of grindset will so much as make a dent in the improvement in yields.

By overworking, lets say you can get 50% more yield. In 1950, the per hectare yield for Maize was 2.4 tons, in 2018 it was 11.07 tons. Lets say that by working twice as many hours, you're able to work twice as much land, you still only get 4.8 tons. This isn't sustainable growth on a societal level.

A term for this is "Production Possibility Frontier". A society doesn't get anywhere by maxxing out your PPF, straining and bursting and making everyone miserable. You, as an individual, may increase your value relatively in your own life, and that's a choice you're making.

But it has nothing to do with actually making a better society. The west didn't become great by having workaholics, it became great by making it easy to innovate and implement innovations, and having people who were genetically predisposed to innovation.

Unless you think Europeans just worked 10x harder than Indians? So while Euros were working 50 hours a week in 1800, Indians were working 5 hours a week? Of course not.

Or take coding. How much more efficient has coding become due to the development of tools which make coding easier? Lets say coding tools had increased coding efficiency 10-fold since the year 2000. No amount of "grindset" is going to do more than that.

Again, if YOU want to grindset, and reap the individual rewards for your grind - good for you. And I understand an employer needs competent employees because that's the variable on which he's competing with other companies.

But it has nothing to do with progress. India has always had hard workers and cheap labor. That gets you precisely nowhere.

On top of that, promoting wage competition with the third world, and this might come as a shocker - is probably not a winning political proposal. You're effectively proposing to undo all of the gains made in the western world.

What is happening is businesses are treating the immediate incentives in their narrow world of competition within the Production Possibility Frontier as having anything to do with what matters for progress as a whole.

If you want to actually have progress, you need to identify geniuses and instead of filtering them out through the template-brain-bashing university system and some corrupt hiring process, coddle them and empower them. Build baby farms for them. They are worth every penny ten thousand times over. They are progress incarnate.

[Calamari @calamari25]

@Devon_Eriksen_ And I don’t think the quoted thread is even really just pedantic, it’s closer to outright sophistry in many places.

[Calamari @calamari25]

@Devon_Eriksen_ I think you might be over complicating this. We generally just call what you’re observing pedantry. And just as you say, I don’t need to elaborate this because most people know what pedantry is when they see it.

[The Alt Hyp @thealthype]

Has literally zero to do with it, when atheism was big on youtube I spent years pointing out how shitlibs are more nonsensical than biblical creationists, and most churches are pro-gay anyway, and the defection rate for gays from their church is only like 12% higher than not-gays, and of those who defect basically none of them mention anti-gay attitudes of the church.

I'm not saying it doesn't happen ever, but it's probably less than 1% of gay atheists are would-be christians if not for them being gay.

Take Fuentes - he's gay, he stays with the church. I guess he's just such an honorable fellow about that? I don't get it.

But he stays because you believe it or you don't, and maybe if the church is saying you're bad for being gay that might make you slightly more likely to defect - but there's like 100 other sins of things that you do, and yet you don't go "oh, the church says I can't fight or steal or be a drunk or womanize... that invalidates me, I'M LEAVING".

What is actually driving people away from the church, straight and gay, is that the bible is full of literally insane stories that DIDN'T, FUCKING, HAPPEN.

If my issue was the anti-gay aspects of christianity, how much easier to just find a pro-gay church? I'd have numbers and institutions on my side, with plenty of "bible scholars" who have already built a nice little intellectual hugbox for that.

This is just a move to dismiss criticism, and it's a bizarre, surreal cope. And me, of all people, who clearly hates shitlibs and hates 90% of gays, would base my disdain for christianity on the basis of a homosexuality that I have zero fondness for?

It's such a fucking wild, insane cope.

What if I told you about Bob. "Bob talks to the creator of the universe, he can sail the stars, heal any illness, he's a magic man. He killed himself, but not really, to counterbalance your sins. He's pissed on blind men's faces and now they can see. But there's no proof of this other than some third-hand accounts, mostly over 100 years after Bob did his magic. He also says it's a sin to masturbate.

Oh, you don't believe in Bob? Oh, and you think that the revealed truth of Bob is insane and counterproductive for any political movement in the future? Clearly, you just want to masturbate!"

I think that works as a psychological trick. You have some insane doctrine, part of your doctrine goes "X behavior is bad", now anyone who disbelieves your insane doctrine - well they must just want to engage in X behavior!

[The Alt Hyp @thealthype]

I don't know what "social innovations" you're talking about.

Europe began to technologically innovate after 1100 AD due to the "European Revolution", a genetic change, most concentrated in Benelux, the Rhine, Northeast France and England.

Before around 1100, Europe was on the same level as the Roman Empire in terms of cutting edge, and generally behind in terms of implementation.

This has to do with the "flood" from ~400-600 AD dis-integrating whole regions of the former Roman Empire, and with illiteracy causing any sort of mill, waterworks, irrigation, manufactory, being no longer maintained and not written down.

While Roman tech wasn't completely erased, it would always persist somewhere, it wasn't diffused in the (somewhat) unified way it was in say, 300 AD.

I think Christianity made the "flood" worse, in the same way the Bolsheviks made the situation in Russia in 1917 worse.

And all the same arguments to defend Christianity at this time can be done to defend bolshevism.

- Rome was in turmoil anyway (yes, that's when revolutions typically occur)
- The eastern Roman Empire survived; Christianity didn't kill that! (Bolshevist Russia "survived" too, and the most pro-bolshevik area - the Moscow-St.Petersburg oval - was the best off)
- Christianity unified Europeans in a dark time (obvious parallel)
- Europe did XYZ good things during Christianity (Communist Russia did XYZ things)

Basically, all the kinds of arguments used to justify christianity as a positive political force, or to deny its negative impact, can be made for the bolshevik regime.

And it SHOULD be similar to that. Would the Russian state have survived if not for Bolshevism? Would the Roman state have survived if not for Christianity?

Obviously the timescales are compressed, but it's the same story.

[The Alt Hyp @thealthype]

Right, so, basically, with the Roman Empire - there's a problem regarding scale of things.

The resolution for Roman history is like, "the Germans were winning the war until D-day, when general Roosevelt marched on Berlin, defeating the German army led by Walter Model in the decisive battle of Bastogne before prayers to their tribal god Hister (named after the Hister river, contemporarily miswritten as "Hitler"), believed to be somewhere in northern Europe. Speculation exists that the Germans were weakened by wars with the peoples of the hammer-and-sickle culture located along the volga prior to the battle of Bastogne."

What you have is a series of events, of largely speculative scale and impact, that preceded the generally agreed "fall" of Rome, and are tied to together and put into neat and tidy historical atlases that give a deeply false sense of certainty regarding chronology, scale, and persons involved.

A little exercise I did with Jared Diamond's nonsense was to come up with reasons why civilization started in X location. For example, why did civilization start in the La Plata river valley and not the Indus or Tigris and Euphrates? What are some reasons why the Nile river area is a poor place for civilization?

I recommend doing that with "Why did the crises of the 3rd century lead to reforms which allowed the Roman Empire to survive for the next 900 years? What were the reasons Rome's defeat by Hannibal was inevitable? Why did the Social War bring down the Republic? Why was the Gallic Empire able to conquer Latium and Iberia? How did Christianity help stabilize and thus save the western Roman Empire? Why did the Eastern Roman Empire fall so easily while the Western Empire held on?" Of course it's a kind of self-critique and based on you doing it yourself, and is only as effective as you allow it to be.

[The Alt Hyp @thealthype]

"Was it Bolshevism that caused WW1, that brought in the Germans, Hapsburgs?"

What you're doing is you're pointing to problems which the Russian Empire previously weathered, and that the Roman Empire previously weathered, which christian Rome could not, asserting they were worse this time or that a non-Christian Roman Empire wouldn't have been able to weather them.

This is all speculation, with motivated reasoning from historians who in the past wanted to elevate christianity as some evolutionary thing, and more recently historians who see the parallels between shitlibbery and torah-observant christianity (same neurotype appeal).

All we know solidly is that Rome, for all it's dysfunctions, endured until it became officially christian.

1. The more capable were shunted into the priesthood and monasteries instead of the army.

2. Celibacy among priests, monks, nuns was dysgenic, which certainly prolonged the darkness of the jewish ("christian") ages

3. Created a whole new vector for civil war. Judaism, being inherently supremacist, doesn't tolerate variety or any kind of organic folk-spiritualism.

So it weakens the army in the short term by removing your best and brightest, castrates the most capable, and opens a new internal front to fight over who is the right kind of jew.

These obvious problems serve as an explanation for why Rome happened to unravel when the elites started to embrace judaism, when the empire had survived 200 years of dynastic dysfunction and succession wars .

Black Africa is mostly "christian". Liberia's constitution is a carbon-copy of the US constitution.

It's also aesthetically stultifying and comes from dirty arabs. Also the stories are literally retarded and there's something wrong with your brain when you pretend to believe / rationalize as allegory the nonsense throughout the books chosen as "canon" at Nicea.

[Eric Arthur Blair @ErArBla]

"We can't remigrate millions of people, they've been here for ages!"

"Tell that to Prussia."

"Ok. Where's Prussia?"

"..."

[Calamari @calamari25]

@TheGloriousLion Additionally, I suspect the places that hunted witches the most fanatically are today the places that are the most fanatically ‘progressive’ and these are related.

[Calamari @calamari25]

@TheGloriousLion I think that belief in witchcraft was probably somewhat normal. I reckon the key difference between those who hunted witches vs those who didn’t was a desire to punish evil witches for hurting people vs those who didn’t care.

[Sean Last @Sean__Last]

It is unfortunate that "internet atheists" got such a bad reputation. Even today, it is still considered rude, or not compelling, to point out that someone's religious views are obviously false and should be stigmatized as irrational in a way that it is not considered rude, or uncompelling, to say this about other parts of people's worldview. Very bad norms around this.

[John Carter @martianwyrdlord]

Tradbros don't want to hear this, but it is the simple truth. For a thousand years Christendom fought a desperate holding action trying to prevent the conquest of Europe by Islam. It was a continent under siege - desperately fighting over several centuries to retake the Iberian peninsula, the long ineffectual rugby scrum to retake the Holy Land, their daughters being taken for rape toys in Barbary pirate raids, their sons being abducted as janissaries and turned against their own people.

Then the Enlightenment led to Europeans unlocking unprecedented technoscientific capabilities.

Within decades of the industrial revolution the entire Muslim world lay supine, a European boot on its neck. No more janissaries. No more White girls whored out in Ottoman harems. In the aftermath of the Great War, the Ottoman empire was carved up as an afterthought.

Whatever its other merits, Christianity didn't do that. The overwhelming military advantages developed by the scientific method did. Breach-loading cannons. Ranged artillery. Rifled firearms. You can certainly argue that the Christian belief in a rational cosmos was a necessary precursor to science - although this is debatable, the Hellenes did pretty well in this regard without it - but you can't argue that they are one and the same.

[Bizlet @bizlet7]

@uberboyo What actually would happen is that boomers would get mad and fed post on facebook and the GOP would nominate Marco Rubio or Nikki Haley and the Dems would win.
No civil war. Total Dem Victory.

[Kevin DeAnna @VDAREJamesK]

I don’t think so. Conservatives would be sad and angry but the GOP would come out as one and stress This Is Not Who We Are. They nominate Haley or whoever, GOP wins, nothing changes, we endure leftist snark forever and historians gravely intone about how close “fascism” was

[Keith Woods @KeithWoodsYT]

🇬🇧💶 The UK is a poor country with a lot of very rich people. The average person in the UK will soon be worse off than the average Pole or Slovenian.

Britain has actually been in a state of decline since the 80s, how did this happen?

1/13 🧵

[The Alt Hyp @thealthype]

@Littoria88 The death of youtube was a huge blow. Youtube favors long-form content, and biases toward intellectuals.

[Harri C-Bannerman @stirling_burghs]

@spargles It's been that way since, at least, before the Second World War among certain left-wing intellectual circles. Orwell wrote a lot about it.

[Littoria @Littoria14]

Leftists being hunted down and destroyed by their former Jewish patrons have always dismissed the critique of Jewish power as the paranoid delusion of low-status racists. They're now in shock. It's like jokingly saying Bloody Mary in the mirror and then she actually appears. 🤣🤣