nerdspeak

@RendHeaven In tribes or villages sex is also regulated, in ways that would prohibit the sort of harem you describe. You could only get what you describe in contexts with major power imbalances, eg, warlords who start to control the surplus production in coercive ways. Even now, I can only imagine it with a major power imbalance in place, even if it was fully consensual. I can’t imagine Leonardo DiCaprio keeping a harem of big-name female stars, but I’m sure he could keep a harem of entry-level aspiring models.

When I was younger and dumber coming from Western hookup culture, I lived in a middle-income (not even poor) country and unintentionally had what a previous poster called a “harem.” By that I mean, multiple women who must have known I was seeing others since we met max once every two weeks, but for whom I was their only partner (as I found out later). I actually felt really bad when I later figured this out, since I wasn’t even helping them financially, beyond paying for our dates. I didn’t really know I had an obligation to communicate clearly what the rules were, etc., and it eventually caused some drama. For the women I guess it made a kind of sense, in that they thought by being faithful to me without discussing commitment, they created a kind of resource/emergency assistance debt back from me, since the state and their families couldn’t reliably protect them. These women were otherwise very middle-class in their presentation, with masters degrees, jobs, etc. In poorer countries, where being “independent” in the Western sense is not really possible (to the extent we actually are is a separate convo), people spend a lot of time organizing mutually dependent relationships and ideally becoming dependent on a powerful patron. I dont think we can generalize from poor countries to the West, or from West to poor (or even middle income) countries too much.

This is some rap video fantasy. No, the women will resent the man using their economic leverage to “buy” an asymmetric relationship, and end up dating others anyway. Some financially insecure women would agree to it initially, but it will not last.

You cannot convince anyone to try this — okay, maybe if they’re still under 22 or so. If you want it you need to date poly people. Or you can try playing games and bait and switching, but the resulting drama can ruin months of your life.

At the BA level in Europe, there are so many students per professor in the first couple years that the only way to teach is to just drill the rote basics and have the students feed it back on the exam. It doesn't mean the professors are dogmatic as people -- they're not. They just have very little time per student and want to make sure they get the basics.

Studying academic philosophy at a small liberal arts college -- like Reed, Williams, Wesleyan, Oberlin -- is probably a lot better than at a big research university like UCLA. Profs at small colleges are less attached to scholarly one-upmanship and more into the subject matter itself, and the teaching of it. That said, I was taught mostly by boomers, who had a much more chill and exploratory education than people educated after the 1973 oil crisis. GenX and millennial professors had to go through so much angst to get their jobs, that even Reed profs are now probably ruthlessly careerist and highly specialized like the profs at R1s.

Don't you think the dialectical process of arguing with professors and other students is useful? Even with Claude AI -- yes, okay, I admit, I will upload chapters I don't want to read closely, ask it to make argument maps for me, ask it to point out logical flaws, etc. But, I wouldn't really know how to prompt it properly if I hadn't learned the skills directly in class. And it's very hard to find intellectually honest people to have debates with outside of university. Most people in everyday life -- even smart ones -- don't want to work hard, don't know how to structure their thoughts, and will straw man your arguments and get emotional, rather than have a real discussion.

Anything is possible. The question is, will it help you. Whether it will help you think/contemplate deeply, depends on your definition of thinking/contemplating deeply. Really, what it will do is help you clearly articulate premises and arguments about things in a structured way, that allows other people to challenge them. It will not help you learn to meditate or enter altered states or anything like that. Philosophy in the US and UK (again at BA level) is mostly about learning to challenge other people's arguments and build your own, while sign-posting to communicate clearly and without being unfair. Basically, it's about learning to build argument maps like those described by Desgupta (a Berkeley prof who teaches their methods course) here - https://shamik.net/teaching/materials/dasgupta a brief guide to argument mapping.pdf. It's not about pondering the nature of reality or anything like that, necessarily. Of course it could be, since philosophy can be about anything as long as you follow the rules of argument. You can choose to take courses in metaphysics that deal with that, but that's almost incidental to the skills they're trying to teach you. You can take an intro course at a community college for a few hundred dollars, why not try it and see if you like it.

I have an undergraduate degree in philosophy and later switched to politics for grad school. A few thoughts. By itself it won’t get you a job, but employers like philosophy majors if they also have a vocational skill. When I worked in finance, we preferred to hire philosophy majors over business majors, as long as the philosophy majors could prove they knew some finance basics. While it gets very dry at graduate level, undergraduate-level philosophy is about learning to structure and communicate your thoughts in an honest way. All humanities degrees are like this to a degree, but philosophy is more rigorous than English or history. You can only learn to do this by practice — writing papers and I’m seminar discussion. These are active skills, and very useful ones. You will miss out on these skills if you only watch YouTube. Even better than Teaching Company to get a sense of real classes are the Berkeley iTunesU lectures from the late 2000s that are still on Internet Archive. I recommend David Ebrey’s Ancient Philosophy and Hubert Dreyfus’s Existentialism in Literature and Film (from 2008, before he got too senile).

You can approximate it — I’m basically on a 15-hour workweek — but it takes years and a lot of knowledge and skill. The idea that the average person with no business experience or specialized knowledge can do this right away is silly. What I did — and what Ferriss actually did too — is: 1. Come in with a fair amount of knowledge developed through working for others, in a field chosen because it’s fairly easy to do as a self-employee person 2. Experiment with a lot of things while working quite hard for several years, and failing a lot 3. Finally found a good niche, kept working very hard to to afford to build infrastructure, and then gradually hired and outsourced to reduce the owner’s time investment over 2-3 years You can’t just read his book and do it lol. Although a lot of what he says is true — many clients / customers are not profitable so it’s key to avoid them, you can hire very good people in developing countries, usually 1 offer will make a disproportionate amount of your profit, etc.

To make this work, the unions need to be represented in govt through a labor party that can act to prevent offshoring. Both the Labour Party and the British unions made a lot of mistakes in the 70s.

Tl;dr: we really should focus 90% of our energy on labor union organizing, because the threat of strike action -- and thus harm to the profits of the capitalist class -- is the only way to exact concessions from the capitalists/investors. I'm from the US, but I've lived in Europe for a while, and for the last few years in what could be described as "social democracies" or "mixed economies," where many crucial goods and services are either taken out of the market altogether or heavily regulated by the state. Most recently, I've been living in Belgium, where higher education and healthcare are essentially free, unemployment insurance payments continue almost indefinitely, it's quite difficult to be fired, etc. And this is considered a fairly mediocre Bismarckian welfare state compared to the social democracies in the Nordic countries. Denmark, for example has basically abolished poverty -- the 5% of the population living below the poverty line is comprised almost entirely of university students, and not because they are actually living in what we'd call poverty, but because they are receiving most of their livelihood in kind from the state rather than in the form of cash income. Ok, so why is there so much less inequality -- of both opportunity and of extreme outcomes? It's because there is high labor union membership, and I think that is at least 70% of the explanation. The credible threat of a significant strike -- and thus a pause in profits for the capitalists -- is the only way to reliably exact concessions from the investor class. It doesn't matter what sort of moral case you make -- capitalists will twist morality into what serves their interests (emphasizing property rights, freedom of contract, personal responsibility). We need to be able to threaten to hurt the rate of return of their businesses, otherwise stage-orange capitalists and the politicians who take their money won't pay any attention. Rates of labor union participation for some select countries: Denmark: 67% Norway: 52% Belgium: 50% Romania: 20-25% United States: 10% You'll notice labor standards steadily declining as union membership drops -- and Romania is a much poorer country than the US, yet worker protections (at least in the formal economy) are still stronger, with lengthy parental leave, etc. I also think having a political party to represent labor is important, but there is no point in trying to do that unless the labor organizations are already there.

Being small doesn’t make social democracy easier, it makes it harder. You have to trade to get most industrial inputs, many public goods benefit from economies of scale, etc. The Nordics are not that homogenous. In Finland especially there’s a lot of ethnic conflict. Belgium — which is still pretty good — is not homogenous at all. No country has access to infinite access to material resources at home or abroad. The main variable is the strength of organized labor, and its tie-in with a labor-oriented political party.

I would add that: 1. Firms in social democracies require natural resource inputs, but they still generally behave more responsibly than American multinationals because they respond to demands of organized labor. While Belgium was an imperial power, the Nordics were not. 2. The Eastern Bloc countries sustained their manufacturing model by receiving below-market prices on oil from the Soviet Union, extracted from places like Siberia that were effectively colonies of the core Slavic Soviet republics of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. I don’t know if the USSR can be a model for much although the 1917 revolution is inspiring in a way. 3. @DocWatts I agree the main task is building civic/social solidarity, and the only way to do that which I can see is through labor organizing. Exploitation by the investor class is the one thing most of us have in common.

They're not insignificant relative to their population, and if you combine all of the functional European welfare states together it is a very serious economic and military bloc. The Nordics are very entrepreneurial. Sweden, Norway, and Denmark have more entrepreneurs per capita than the United States, which makes sense as it's much lower-risk there -- you will still get free healthcare, etc. even if your business fails. Given the small size of the populations, they've had a lot of big successes, even in consumer tech sector which supposedly benefits from fluid labor markets if you believe the Silicon Valley propaganda. Especially in Sweden but in Finland too. More Bismarckian welfare states like Belgium, Germany, etc. have lower rates of startup formation than the Nordics. They're also less visible in consumer-facing tech. But, they are leaders in manufacturing innovation, particularly in machine tools and electrical equipment. Certain regions of Germany have high concentrations of SMB manufacturers that make critical components for global supply chains and those skills don't exist anywhere else. The Nordics have extremely serious militaries. The Finns defeated the USSR, the Swedes have one of the best navies in the world, etc. Some far-left organizations like to push the mass strike as a tool, and of course a mass strike would provoke massive retaliation by the capitalist class and the state. But most of those organizations are interested in creating a revolutionary situation, which is not what I'm interested in at all. I'm interested in concessions like healthcare, better working conditions, free university education, job retraining post-layoff, etc. You don't need a general strike to exact concessions. You can get a lot through targeted strikes, collective bargaining, legislative action (if you have a labor party), co-determination where representatives of labor sit on boards and keep the shareholders in check (like in Germany and the Nordics), etc.

There is something fundamentally wrong about how cops in the US approach the population. They seem to think they're running a counterinsurgency operation in Iraq. I wonder why...maybe it's because they recruit a lot of ex-military guys... The militarization of police in Belgium is also a thing, especially in Antwerp. But the suspicious, hostile vibe is not the same, and it's due to something deeply wrong about the post-9/11 US security state and the effects of non-stop war.

@Staples not necessarily, since the 1970s there has been a big effort by rich countries to neutralize the political assertiveness of the newly decolonized countries by decreasing the power of the UN General Assembly, by getting them heavily in debt, imposing austerity through structural adjustment, backing coups to kill off guys like Allende and Sankara, arming reactionary abslute monarchies and military dictatorships to counter political movements wtih developmentalist (i.e., anti-free trade) ideas, etc. We could, like, just interfere with them a bit less, allow them to form regional blocs instead of imposing free trade policies that mostly benefit rich countries, forgive some of the toxic debt, stop funding reactionary monarchs and military dictators, etc.

Yeah, but the non-profits mostly get their funding from governments and multinational corporations. The non-profit industrial complex is a thing. Many Global South countries made significant strides in the postwar era through the developmentalist state. This threatened rich countries’ access to cheap natural resources, and also threatened US interests in the Cold War, so we crushed these countries with structural adjustment programs in the 80s. Loans — a form of “aid” — were given by IMF and World Bank under the condition of reforming their economies in ways that benefited the richest countries. it’s gotten more subtle now but conditional aid is still a powerful coercive tool. When countries refuse this aid, their leaders often get killed. See Thomas Sankara and many others.

Of course neo-imperialist ideology is much more subtle than in early 20th century. In policy discourse it now takes the form of: Wehave a responsibility to protect civilians from jihadists and oppressive regimes, we have a responsibility to foster economic progress (which often involves preferential access for western firms and “free trade” policies that often crush local firms), etc.

I get what this “development” talk points to but it’s also dangerously close to neo-imperialist ideology. Like, of course I prefer living in Belgium to Afghanistan, but I am making that judgment from my own perspective according to my own values.

It depends on what your values are. If you value economic freedom above all else then the US is still one of the best places in the world. In Western Europe you go through the equivalent of an audit every time you file taxes. If you value un-corrupt elections, public goods like education and clean energy, and free high-quality education, then places like the Netherlands or Belgium are much better.

Germany has a lot of issues that we don't need to get into but if they do rearm, they'll have opinions like France and the UK, except slightly weaker because they won't have nukes. No way they start a nuclear program, their whole system is based on exports of manufactured goods and US will punish them very severely

What is your definition of corporatism? Corporatism in the European sense brings organized labor into decisions. E.g., in Germany, companies with more than 2,000 employees need to have half of their board of directors elected by the rank-and-file employees. This prevents some of the worst excesses of predatory capitalism. Fascism has some corporatist elements but it's different in a couple ways: 1. It removes the independence of unions from the state 2. It makes confrontational strike action illegal (all strikes have to basically be approved by the state/ruling party) 3. It's tied to an aggressive imperialist foreign policy. I'm not backing Trump or Vance, and probably Trump is a threat to further democratic backsliding, but this Vance in my understanding does not advocate for 1, 2, or 3. I'm not sure I'd agree that Reagan respected democracy but that's a side-debate we won't get into for now.

Edited the post

Was it a miracle that the grenade thrown at Bush II didn't blow up? Was it a miracle, as Hitler interpreted it to be, that the many assassination attempts in the early 30s failed? Was Reagan surviving being shot a miracle? I've also had several near misses, narrowly getting hit by cars, almost falling off a fire escape on a skyscraper and catching myself in the last rung. These aren't miracles it's just surprisingly hard to die.