What are you going to do, force people to have kids? Below the replacement rate, the English are dying out. That's fine by me, but I thought for some odd reason it might bother you.

It's the demographics not the numbers.

E.g.
http://aei.pitt.edu/11030/1/20090203155203_SCOPE2008-3_2_JoanMuyken.pdf

You don't hit the replacement rate, you not only end up with a huge burden of economically unproductive elderly to pay for (especially with increased life-spans), you eventually just die out. You're currently below the replacement rate. You need immigrants to survive.

Seems to me the prevalent mood of philosophy is deflationism and silentism on the big questions rather than nihilism/relativism. "Whereof one cannot speak..." etc. Whereas the prevalent mood among the populace is a mixture of obliviousness, confusion, and cynicism. The attitudes occupy complementary sections of a landscape over which neither has control, and the type of mistrust is distinct from an epistemic point of view. It's access to knowledge that leads the philosopher to self-circumscribe away from big-picture answers, whereas its a perceived alienation from knowledge that leads the layman to a similar (but more disconcerting from their perspective) position.

@Chester

Without a lot of immigrants your country will die, not just economically, but in every way. Like most Western European countries, you're not reproducing yourselves enough to maintain economic growth. And the Tories know this. So, what's going to happen is simply that the immigrants you didn't like from Europe are going to be replaced by immigrants you don't like from somewhere else. Apart from everything else, you realize this, right?

Yes, our friends the insurance companies value FREEDOM too. All AMERICAN FREEDOM. :death:

Why wouldn't the PEOPLE want a healthcare system optimized to make profits for insurance companies that costs twice as much as one optimized for providing healthcare? The PEOPLE are smart. They value FREEDOM.

Yesterday, the IHME model (the one Trump keeps quoting) was predicting 75,000 total deaths in the US from COVID by August. Today, it's at 135,000.

https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america

Then there's this:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/05/04/coronavirus-update-us/

We couldn't work it out either.

There has never been an instance where N-word flaming hasn't led to a ban and there probably never will be.

Just want to add that if anyone loses it and flames wildly and the flame contravenes the racism/homophobia/sexism guidelines, the most likely result will be an instant ban.

Yes, I'll put it this way, on the information we have to date, lockdowns appear justified and appear to be working. But there are too many variables to make definitive conclusions. If we find more evidence of huge numbers of people with antibodies, indicating a much higher proportion of asymptomatic cases than originally thought, for example, that would suggest when we come off lockdown, in the absence of a vaccine, we're going to end up in herd immunity territory anyway and the Swedish model of mostly voluntary distancing might look like a better idea than a straight comparison with its neighbours currently suggests.

Interestingly, the Irish don't work much. Practically the whole country except for pubs closes at 5 pm. It's bizarre. — frank

We're too drunk to find shops after 5.

Ireland's behaviour pre-lockdown affects their caseload now. I'm hypothesizing that if they had had better behaviour pre-lockdown they'd be more like Norway now. I'm also hypothesizing that if Sweden had locked down (having had good pre-lockdown behaviour), they'd be more like with Norway now. No contradiction there, just two timeframes, a delayed effect, and a cultural variable. (This also implies that if Ireland hadn't locked-down, they'd be worse than Sweden now.)

Not sure where the point of disagreement is. I don't trust Google with my data, but I trust them to provide me with my cake recipe. Am I wrong on this? Or is there another specific sense in which the contours of the landscape are ill-defined. Give me an example.

When we Irish were asked to voluntarily social distance, we threw coronavirus parties in pubs and the streets of Dublin were crowded with shoppers. The Swedes did what they were told. It's partly cultural. So, comparing like with like, it makes more sense to put Sweden up against other Nordic countries. They've got ten times as many deaths as Norway, for example, with just under twice the population.

Think climate change denial on a smaller scale. Similar motives, similar backers, similar tools.

Calling it the neoliberal project makes it sound like it was consciously conducted by scam artists, as if someone actually wanted to concentrate wealth. — frank

Yeah, they did. On Blyth's analysis, Keynesian in that form was unsustainable anyway, but there were conscious efforts by monied interests to concentrate wealth, none of which are particularly secret.

It's laid out pretty clearly in, for example:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/183033.A_Brief_History_of_Neoliberalism

For Americans, deregulation performed by a guy in a cowboy hat was in line with the American identity. — frank

:point:

scam artists — frank

Alan Greenspan was a fan of Ayn Rand's. Like it or hate it, there is an ideological aspect to American neoliberalism, and it's essentially neoconservatism. — frank

Neoconservatism directs itself primarily towards social conservatism and hawkish foreign policy. Neoliberalism is concerned with economics. The concepts face in different directions. Analytically, what's the return on conjoining them? (Socially liberal politicians in America are also almost exclusively neoliberal. If neoliberalism was ideologically neoconservative, they wouldn't be. Again, contextual confluence not ideological concordance.)

When a string of savings & loans collapses due to poor lending practices, I think an infusion of cash into the economy would be helpful in reversing a collapse in confidence. Is that wrong? — frank

The story of why things failed is more complicated than that as is the best solution. Though the US got it more right than the UK.

See, e.g:



(A fairly compelling story, though his predictions re Ireland didn't pan out. We are the poster boys for austerity and the only country where it seemed to "work".)

My theory is that military spending in the US helped hide instability in the banking system over a period of several decades. — frank

Tell me more.

Not that this has anything to do with Joe Biden, but he's too boring to talk about anyway.

Then you're saying a company is an inanimate thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

There's a sense in which a company can be seen to have agency. Loosely, we speak of companies making decisions and so on. But they're better viewed as systems of opportunities and constraints closer to weather events than human agents in my view. Market forces are transparent enough for that to be the case.

The problem with human influence is that what feeds "the bottom line" might change, but with the weather it always stays the same. The question then is how much of this is publicly disclosed, or to what extent can the company hide the exact nature of what it feeds on. A company must be endowed with some capacity for privacy to provide competitive equity. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, companies can maintain privacy on certain issues and can mislead and manipulate us, but the 'rules of the game' are largely transparent and the playing field in full view. We can make intelligents presumptions on risk/return of deceitful behavior etc. So, yes, they might fuck around a bit with our data but they won't deliberately give us the wrong result when we search for a cake recipe. In other words, the contours of the trust landscape are well-defined.

so there's some overlap between the two — frank

There's confluence but not concordance. Bill Clinton was a neoliberal too, but not a neocon (Hillary, on the other hand, hmm.)

I think that military spending during peacetime is a way a Neoliberal government can force the economy forward when Savings & Loan institutions or the banking system itself becomes overtly unstable (which they did occasionally since the late 80s). — frank

Well, as you no doubt saw from the Blyth vid, the neoliberal project is to divorce the material benefits of growth from the vast majority of the population and concentrate them in a tiny minority. So, the question becomes not 'How do we get growth?'—neoliberalism can deliver on that in multiple ways and we all get cheap technology (yay!) while not being able to afford houses and having fuck-all savings and huge debt (boo!). No, the question is 'How do we maintain an equitable enough sharing of the benefits of growth to maintain social cohesion'? Because otherwise 'Democracy' which is essentially a bunch of laws to protect the rich from us killing them and taking all their shit starts to look like a bad deal to the plebs propping up its dying corpse.

:up:

Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century. Mark Blyth.

Cheers bro'.

@Pfhorrest

@jkg20 is spot on.

Sushi made it obvious from the start he didn't give a shit about your feelings and was just going to say what he was going to say. Which is exactly what you should ideally expect (and hope for) in criticism.

As an aside, I've just finished re-editing and relaunching a book of short stories, which I put a lot a lot of work into and which I've been highly emotionally invested in. But it took me over a year to go back and see some of the fuckups in there because it can take that long away from a creative project to divest yourself of bias and look on it in a way similar to a detached critic. Of course, you'll never be fully objective, but you'll get nowhere without giving yourself time to be so. Your reaction to Sushi suggests you're not there yet. But if you want your work to be better, you need to get there. That's just the way it is.

Also, you're not even supposed to be promoting your own work here or getting feedback on it. Normally, I delete that kind of stuff as self-promotion/advertising. And now I've got another good reason, which is people getting pissed off that everyone doesn't love their stuff as much as they do.

@csalisbury Thanks for keeping this going. This is my 10,000th post and if I could distil from that mass of writing as much wisdom as can be found in a few lines of poetry of this level, it would have been worthwhile. :love:

Thanks :up: Not wasting my 10,000th post on you though, so don't expect an encore. :fire:

On the positive side, in Georgia you can now get a haircut and spread a potentially lethal disease to your neighbor at the same time. Pandemic multi-tasking the American way.

Companies are even more predictable than the weather as long as you know what feeds the bottom line. You can trust Google as long as its profits align with your interests. Period. The trick is figuring out if, how, and when they do.

This might be specific and not general — Hanover

Yup. Edited.

In fact, I'd go as far to say that there is an equivocation error throughout because the word "trust" changes meaning when the prepositional phrase is added. I trust you to be here at 9 am means I expect you'll be here at 9 am. It has nothing to do with an assessment of your veracity, but just my expectation. But, if I say "I trust you," that's an assertion of my belief in your honesty.. — Hanover

Firstly, trust in general is not limited to an assessment of veracity. I trust the military not primarily because they tell me the truth but because they can protect me. The word changes sense with context. Secondly, the "trust you to do/be" is an implied extension, even when not specified. If trust is about veracity then it is not just "I trust you" but also 'I trust you (to be truthful with me)" and "I expect you to be truthful with me". In trust there is an implied expectation. I trust my wife means I expect her to be faithful and honest etc. But I guess when we use the word "trust" we imply some further emotional investment, some deeper significance than mere expectation. Still, it's there. So, there's no equivocation, just shades of meaning.

Edit: I'm impressed you almost know what a prepositional phrase is except it's not but an object complement made up of a non-finite clause in which is embedded a prepositional phrase.

For ROI per unit time/cognitive effort invested best explanation of "why-we-got-into-bed-with-neoliberalism-and-why-we-need-to-get-the-fuck out-now" I've seen/read/heard. And I'm only half an hour in. :starstruck: :100:

:strong: :clap:

Pretty much.

@Metaphysician Undercover @Hanover @unenlightened

Some insightful analysis there. Putting it together, does something like the following schema cover the examples provided?:

Trust

1) Awareness – Habitual/nonhabitual (Part of background assumptions vs. requires more of a conscious decision).
2) Scope – General/Specific (trust in general vs. trust to be/trust to do something specific).
3) Agency – Agent/Non-agent
4) Polarity – Positive/Negative

E.g.

"I trust friends."

Habitual – General – Agent – Positive

(Friends are the type of people I trust)

"I trust my friend."

Nonhabitual – General – Agent – Positive

(My friend has shown himself to be trustworthy)

"I don't trust my friend to be on time."

Nonhabitual – Specific – Agent - Negative

(I may trust my friend, in general, but that doesn't mean I trust him/her to do specific things the way I want.)

I trust the Klansman to be a racist — Hanover

[Also analyzable as: "I don't trust the Klansman not to be a racist"]

Habitual – Specific – Agent – Negative.

(It's part of the nature of Klansmen to be racist).

I trust people to be good — Hanover

Habitual – Specific – Agent – Positive

I don't trust the weather today — unenlightened

Non-habitual – General – Non-agent – Negative

"I don't trust the weather (in general)."

Habitual – General – Non-agent – Negative

We expect stuff to fall when we drop it — Baden

Habitual – General – Non-agent – Positive

Etc.

Anything not fit?

Edit: Cross-posted with @fishnchips. Maybe addresses some of that.

I didnt say that Europe needs to defend itself from China. — frank

Then it doesn't need to prepare to defend itself from China as per:

I dont think Europe is prepared to defend itself from Russia and certainly not China. — frank

Re:

I said it's been shaped politically and economically by the lack of any need to worry about defense.

And this might influence the way a European thinks about the difference between Biden and Trump. — frank

OK.

Saw that one. :up:

Having looked deep into Johnson's heart, I'm of the impression he hasn't got one.

I dont think Europe is prepared to defend itself from Russia and certainly not China. — frank

There's more chance of Martians invading Europe than China. It'd be like Amazon bombing the post office.

This discussion was merged into Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)

Don't see Jacob Rees Mogg in that picture for some odd reason.