Gaikokumaniakku: “If you know how you can feel being in such a lofty position compared to people around you that you could buy and sell them, you might understand your reaction to someone who wants to eliminate that positional advantage.” If you were in such as position, like Perrin, you might say and write things like “One million outgroup lives are not worth a single ingroup fingernail.”
Brent Curtis: Different groups use different quotes. The one that stuck around my peers in my 20s was “Have fun storming the castle!” The quote that shows up in my timeline on twitter most would be “I do not think that it means what you think it means.” The quote that I think gets used by my kids is the “Stop rhyming and I mean it!” couplet. They haven’t seen the movie in ages; we’ll watch it again in honor of Mr Goldman.
Felix: If you know how you can feel being in such a lofty position compared to people around you that you could buy and sell them, you might understand your reaction to someone who wants to eliminate that positional advantage. If you haven’t experienced such a case, try to imagine when your team – the one you play on – wins big. Over and over again. Then dial what you feel about that to eleven. Now, start playing all your games with an umpire who routinely throws the games to your...
Jim: Bob Sykes – Bertrand Russell who traveled to Russia to study the Bolshevik Revolution and was broadly sympathetic with it wrote after meeting Lenin that if one had chanced to sit next him on a train not knowing who he was and engaged in conversation with him one would come away thinking of him as a fanatical and tiresome crank.
DJohn1: Train your memory in the ars memoria. Difficult but not overly so. The basic techniques haven’t changed in 2500 years.
Lu An Li: The status of a serf in Imperial Russia was less than that of a negro slave in the USA!
Kirk: David Foster, There’s something to be said about national characteristics, traits, and milieu; the UK built an empire with innovation and daring during the long run up to losing it, and the contrast between the height of Empire and the post-WWII malaise is telling — at least, in terms of adaptability and innovation. Likewise, the Germans during the post-WWII Wirtschaftwunder years. During that era, the Germans in West Germany were open to innovation and adapted to drastically changed...
Kirk: Likewise with Marx and Engels; few note that the strictures of Marxism mandate theft and expropriation, making them virtues and turning rule of law and private property into crimes. Part of the problem we have with dealing with the left is that we utterly fail to condemn them and their half-price gods for their essential inhumanity and criminality. Che Guevara was a mass-murdering psychopath who enjoyed killing, and yet his blood-stained visage stares out at us yet from the chests of equally insane...
Bob Sykes: Westerners who met Lenin early in his rule often commented that he was a full blown violent psychopath who relished violence. However, modern historians, who are either actual communists or comsymps, cover up Lenin’s criminality and ascribe it to Stalin if they must, or more commonly ignore both and rant about Hitler.
David Foster: “The Germans were so focused on “building an empire” like the ones the French and British had that they were blind to the fact that the inefficiencies and rigidity of those imperial “systems” were stultifying and destroying that which had enabled the French and British to prosper, and, to a lesser degree, the Dutch.” In his memoirs, Wilhelm II seemed close to grasping how German bureaucratic culture had sapped initiative: “Another thing that struck me, in addition to the...
Kirk: I have long thought that there was a uniquely Slavic brand of nihilistic insanity, and this essay clarifies and details why I have developed that line of thought. If the “revolutionaries&# 8221; had gotten on board with Alexander II, they would have attained most of their stated ostensible goals within a generation or two. But, as we see with the eventual attainment of power by their intellectual heirs, the Leninists, those weren’t actually the things they wanted. What they desired,...
Szopen: “Intelligentsia” was not coined in the 1860s by Russians. It was already used in 1844 in Polish by philospher Karol Libelt.
Gaikokumaniakku: Felix: Many of the elites are psychopaths. They are not rational in the way that normal people are. https://www.businessinsi der.com/professions-with -the-most-psychopaths-20 18-5
Albion: The problem for economics is it isn’t divorced from the world it lives in. While marine biologists study plankton they only occasionally swim in the sea, but economists are mindful everyday of the factors that affect their income. In other words, economists have living standards too and feel bites and surges just as much as everyone else. Does this colour vision and reasoning? Possibly. As for importing low-paid workers to displace the existing workforce isn’t about economics. It is to gather...
Felix: Hold on here. The article posted gives reasons why one of the statistical supports behind the story that Bob so clearly states – is bogus. And Bob leads off with a slight variant of those bogus statistics. And doesn’t even mention, let alone address, the article’s points! I’ve noticed the same thing Russ Roberts wrote about. (among other problems with those stats) So, when in his first two paragraphs, Bob acknowledges he, himself, is fooled by lying statistics, I question...
Gaikokumaniakku: I agree with Bob Sykes: The elites have imposed policies that shut down America’s high profit, high wage, high tax revenue industrial base. I don’t have a formal sample, but I have a huge body of anecdata. Collecting data on the former middle class is hard because when you start out middle class and fall into the lower class, you don’t really want to share your experiences with random strangers.
Bob Sykes: The median income hides the results. The data show that working class people have actually lost real income over the last 40 years; middle class incomes have stagnated; and upper class incomes have soared. Not only have the rich captured all the economic growth of the last 40 years, they have clawed income away from the working class. This is really not surprising; it follows from Econ 101. The elites have imposed policies that shut down America’s high profit, high wage, high tax revenue...
Kirk: I’d argue that they didn’t “…die for France…”, but died for an ancien regime whose irresponsibility shaped their world and drove much of the tragedy of those times. Both the French elite and the German one were abysmally feckless and outright stupid, not seeing the long-term ramifications and likely second- and third-order effects of their policies. The Germans were so focused on “building an empire” like the ones the French and British had that they...
Bob Sykes: Standard fuel cells run on hydrogen which is very hard to store and transport, because hydrogen causes embrittlement in steels. A lower temperature catalyst for methane is a big breakthrough. However, storage of methane is a problem because it requires high pressures to get adequate amounts on board a vehicle. A better solution would be a (relatively) low temperature catalyst for propane, because propane readily liquifies at moderate pressures, solving the storage issues with methane and...
