Yarvin has spent the morning chatting about Austrian economics with 86-year-old crossbench peer and Keynes biographer Lord Skidelsky.
I have to admit, every time I see the name Skidelsky, I think of skid marks, but reading the piece convinces me I shouldn't feel bad about it.
I wish I could remember where this observation came from, which was that when you have (as many languages do) 'gender-indexed' speech, the mother, as care-giver, has to be fluent in both, in order to teach male children how to appropriately communicate. This would obviously have a great impact on a lot of other things that one could speculate on, but probably impossible to prove.
I tend to think that all languages have some sort of gender-indexed differences so these effects are going to exist in all cultures, but it is the accretion of cultural behavior/norms rather than something in the chromosones.
I’m on my phone, so can’t give links, but I encourage a dive into how japanese teach math vs US methods. A couple of points I remember:
-in the US, people who are goid at math get pushed into teaching math, so they often don’t understand why students make the mistakes they do. A large component of Japanese math education is predictive, so a good teacher should know where students are likely to go off the rails and adjust their teaching
-a passing grade in Japan is 60, which is good for math, if you understand 60% of some concepts, that’s not too bad, and the bulk of math education happens in hs. I recall I was involved with an exchange program that sent selected prefectural students to BC. One student was from one of the lower ranking schools, and was considered the weakest candidate academically. Wasn’t a bad kid, but was on the baseball team, so 95% of his effort was on the baseball field. He went to a BC high school where classes were in mid term and had to take a math test because that was scheduled and everyone was astonished because he had a perfect score.
-students in japan still aren’t permitted to use calculators
-they also don’t give partial credit, which is how I got thru my math courses.
Will try and toss some links tomorrow
I'm not sure if I'd be so harsh on the Roman alphabet. You don't want a system that encodes everything.
Something that floors my students is when I teach them about an abcedary, which is a chart that represents the letters by giving them a word that has the sound (A is for apple, etc) Because Japanese kana are the sound they represent, there is no need to create one.
About Michael's question, I think it would work in romanized Japanese because it is essentially creating an anglicized version of Japanese and the consonants plus the context can give enough clues to read them. However, Japanese don't process near as much text in roman letters, so that would be an issue.
A couple of things about reading. It's a bit like second language acquisition, in that no one is guaranteed to acquire reading. There is a basic idea that reading is a interactive process that bounces back and forth between bottom up and top down, but beyond that, there is not much. There is an notion of orthographic depth, but it's often by speakers of one language (usually English) projecting onto other languages.
I tend to think of it a lot like umwelt, which is the unique subjective experience that an organism has that can not be understood by any other organism. Though it doesn't use the word, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" by Thomas Nagel gets at that point. I'll leave it to Harmut to explain umwelt, along with merkwelt and wirkwelt in Uexküll's biosemiotic theory and I've never heard of any linguist taking this up, but I definitely will in another life where I am multi-lingual...
It occurs to me that a lot of education should be guiding people to what they are good at. I always thought I was good at languages, but I realize that I am really good at the languages that are in roman letters. Had I known, I might have opted for vietnamese instead of thai, or even earlier, dove into chinese first (I have several english native friends who have fluency in Japanese and Chinese and all of them did Chinese first and I don’t know anyone who went the opposite way).
FWIW, Donald, I didn't take lj's initial commentary as being aimed at you in particular, but rather being more meta-commentary about the current media environment.
Yes, I know it may have been a shock, I do meta-commentary so rarely that everyone was probably totally confused. (I am assuming we are all channelling Joni Ernst at this point)
Btw, I just looked and Welsh’s most recent posts are about Trump’s crazed tariff policies towards Brazil and the other one is about Epstein. Neither sounds rightwing. He despises Trump as vehemently as anyone here.
Last one from me. I did not say Welsh was right wing. I don't think he is right wing. I'm not claiming he is right wing. And I'm not disagreeing with him because he is or is not right wing. I am just saying that what you are doing with him is the same that the fox news viewer is doing when they react to the last immigrant is taking our social security chryon.
You keep telling us that you don't see why we are so down on twitter/X, you don't see any algorithm at work etc. But the algorithm is not based on whether something is accurate or not, it is based on how well it can push your buttons. Getting you more reactive is what it does.
Welsh is buying into that when he asks you to subscribe and tries to monetize this. You buy into that when you say you had never heard of Hüseyin Doğru, but damn, this really reinforces your opinion of government.
There`s nothing to really do about it in the larger world, but you may want to consider my point rather than reflexively assume I am classifying Welsh as right wing, (I'm not) or assume that everyone knows LGM has a stable of writers so we can treat them all the same.(does everyone?)
and that's the last I'll speak of Welsh.
You didn’t explain what is wrong with taking on Welsh’s bias in this case.
I'm not really sure we are talking about the same thing. I'm talking about Welsh's overall bias in that he wants to be right and he wants to tell everyone so. Neither of us knows anything about Hüseyin Doğru, so neither of us can comment intelligently, but if Germany is going too far, stepping back a bit, we can see how it comes about. Germany, given its history, not only the Holocaust, but also Munich, has a lot to overcome and it is understandable that pro Israel bias, along with the forceful campaign to equate any questioning of Israel with anti-semitism makes me wonder about the idea that Germany is simply doing this as a way of repressing voices. Making this out to be simply an argument about what levers government should use misses that whole problematic history. So it's hard to ignore that bias for me. YMMV
I kind of feel that the attitude that Welsh puts out is the same attitude that has someone like a Robert Kennedy or a Tulsi Gabbard effortlessly slide from left to right.
About LGM, I have noted that I avoid the comments and I've also posted about how I feel uncomfortable with Loomis' take no prisoners attitude. I don't know how the other front pagers feel, though when things get really bad in the comments, it does bubble up to the front page. It's pretty remarkable to have the situation where it looks like a front pager is trolling the commentators, but I do think a lot of their issues are not their political position, it is the speed at which conversation goes on over there, and the underlying snarkiness, which tends to magnify a lot of differences. So when you talk about the blog in that aspect, as I think you are when you talk about a 'certain atmosphere', I agree, but when you say "I fall about halfway between him and the LGM lefties" it sounds to me like you are suggesting the bloggers there occupy a point on the political spectrum, which I don't see.
About Epstein, your link says this There are so many explanations and unanswered questions raised by the release, which also says that there is “no credible evidence … that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions.” That means that the theories alleging Epstein was operating some kind of operation to collect incriminating information for a foreign government (most notably the Israelis) has also been dismissed by the U.S. government.
A friend on facebook noted that Ghislaine Maxwell's father, Robert Maxwell, was given a state funeral in Israel and that what Epstein did bore all the marks of what an intelligence agency would do to get leverage. Being in that framework, there was another post that zoomed that was someone posting a tweet from someone saying that they lived in an area where there were a lot of Russian émigrés and there was a noticable absence of ICE agents. So I do wonder.
I would push back a bit on lumping LGM all together. I won't do a deep dive into each poster, but it's not really fair to suggest that there is one viewpoint when there are multiple authors.
Welch, on the other hand, is one person, so presumably (unless he has guest posters) his blog represents his view. The question of what kind of financial levers the government should use is an interesting question, and the case of Hüseyin Doğru seems pretty bad, but the problem is not the government using those levers, it is that what is happening is basically piggybacked on possibly the most incendiary question, the I/P one, which has a longer history than two other hot questions, abortion and the issue of trans There are others, the question of how much government is appropriate might be another, what racism is, what sexism is, but those problems have some definitional issues, where it is difficult to draw a line around what evidence should be considered.
Welsh seems more interested in being right than in understanding. He starts off with well, he didn't like the truckers strike, but he was opposed to freezing their accounts. and now, 10 years later, he has been proven correct! So yeah, you can learn a lot from other sources, but you need to be careful about taking on their biases.
Just to be clear, my point wasn't about using cryptocurrency, it was about the fact that a government has to control transactions for a number of reasons that are necessary and working with my student about how the EU is looking at controlling cryptocurrency suggests you are going to have the ways to control that will end up like Chekhov's gun.
I hadn't seen or didn't remember Ian Welch. The information about Hüseyin Doğru (love the diacritics!) is interesting, but I'm working online with a masters student who is researching how cryptocurrency legislation should be handled and Welch is not really thinking why the German government can do what it can. Like Donald, I don't know anything about the case, but I don't think it is realistic to expect nations to simply stay with cash money. One thing I like about Japan is that it is much more a cash economy than what Germany sounds like, but it's not clear to me if he wants Germany to be more like Japan, which I guess he imagines would clear up the problem, or wants the Government to put some guardrails because that will deal with the problem? It's not really clear.
Here's a website where Hüseyin Doğru is discussing it https://diem25.org/en/author/huseyin-dogru/
But I can't get the page to load.
It became all the harder to comment when there were several comments aimed at me that I wasn't completely responding to some of the counterpoint.
I feel you. I only participate in the comments of this blog because in other blogs, there is an often an assumption that everyone is in the same room/time zone and people push the advantage without thinking of that. The way I write comments grows out of that, trying to put down enough for people to chew on, but also trying to slow down the pace of the conversation, at least where I am wading in and why I often suggest that piling on is not really so good.
A bit of unsolicited advice, it's always possible to say something like 'let me put a pin in that, and give me a day or two to reply. Some people may just ignore that and try to get in their licks, but most of the people here would understand that (and would probably think less of the people not accepting that)
Hartmut, sorry, I dropped in and saw your post, but thought one had been freed. I think we put a textblock on He of the oven made of masonry units, so that may be why, though Russell did post the name twice, so I'm not sure.
About what topics get people's dander up, I'd go to Martin Luther's observation that "Most human affairs come down to depending upon whose ox is gored." The earth being flat is not on the list of most people's oxen, but other topics can end up being more ox-like.
A couple of observations. I'm probably a/the fly in the ointment. I'm happy to discuss things, but I am pretty big on examining unexamined assumptions. I'll try and illustrate this with an example that's on me.
GftNC and I had an exchange on manipulate and draw out. However, I went back to the comment and I said in the very same comment What I see (after reflection) was that it was becoming evident to me that it was a loser on the internet pretending to be someone else because they couldn't have a proper conversation with adults and admit they were wrong and that the said loser was pulling your strings.
GftNC could say I was wasn't being honest, cause "pulling strings" conjures up the image of a marionette. But I hope that the full quote shows that I'm making the assumption that she wouldn't have started the conversation if she knew she was just being recruited as a foot soldier in the war on cultural Marxism. But she was right to point that out. Hopefully, we won't have to worry about sockpuppets for a while.
Unfortunately, a lot of arguing on the internet takes running off the other side as winning. While that was true for folks like Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon, not so true now. The whole concept of sealioning springs from this, but it shares a notion with other similar interactions, which is to goad a person taking one side of the argument into blowing up and then taking the moral high ground.
From this, I think that it isn't so much the topic, it is the way the argument is processed. I was looking at the old posts and the big debate was gay marriage, which invited as much feeling back then.
Another thing, I imagine some people were a bit taken aback by Charles' text file of our ages, which seems a bit Stasi-like. In a lot of places, especially if people don't have much of a reason to play nice, there would have been fireworks at the comment giving the age range. 'how the F would you know that?' might have been a response. But I'm pretty pleased that this didn't happen here. I can't speak for others, but the whole thing seemed very Charles-like.
If you are talking about the original crew, that was before my time, but we had Hilzoy, Katherine (who did pro bono work for detainees) and Publius who probably wouldn't be put in a Iraq war hawk box. I would try and take a look, but the whole Typepad architecture is very slow and creaky.
But I can pull up the first blog post in case you want a starting point. https://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2003/11/howdy_howdy_how.html
which has this Second, this is not, strictly speaking, a Right-wing blog: it's pretty much a centrist one. While I carry my Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy card with pride, my fellow-bloggers do not. They aren't froth-at-the-mouth Bush-haters, mind you - which will probably disqualify them as being on the Left for a very small yet vocal group of people - but they are most assuredly not Republicans. I look forward to their insights and challenges to my own ideological leanings. I also have a somewhat larger list of people (of varying political beliefs) whom I'm going to hit up for special guest posts from time to time: but for at least the start, three bloggers is probably an optimal number to regularly post here.
Again, this is before I was here, but my understanding is that Moe Lane started the blog, and he was on the conservative side, and worked hard to get voices from the other side, which then moved the blog to the left of center slant it has today.
Talking about good old days, during Iraq/Afgahnistan/Libya, a common plaint (out on the internet) was gee, I wish we could go back to the old Cold War days.
LOL. I guess there's a reason the Hippocratic oath is supposed to start with 'first do no harm' (a wikipedia check says it ain't so Although it is often said that "First do no harm" (Latin: Primum non nocere) is a part of the original Hippocratic oath, no such phrase from which "First" or "Primum" can be translated appears in the text of the original oath, although a similar intention is vowed by, "I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm". Another related phrase is found in Epidemics, Book I, of the Hippocratic school: "Practice two things in your dealings with disease: either help or do not harm the patient". and it likely took shape from longstanding popular nonmedical expression.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “A New Gilded Age”
Yarvin has spent the morning chatting about Austrian economics with 86-year-old crossbench peer and Keynes biographer Lord Skidelsky.
I have to admit, every time I see the name Skidelsky, I think of skid marks, but reading the piece convinces me I shouldn't feel bad about it.
On “An open thread”
Just looked at Michael's handwriting, really has a French feel to it. I remember being confronted with French handwriting when I taught there and was pretty amazed
https://www.frenchliving.co.uk/post/the-serious-matter-of-french-handwriting
"
I wish I could remember where this observation came from, which was that when you have (as many languages do) 'gender-indexed' speech, the mother, as care-giver, has to be fluent in both, in order to teach male children how to appropriately communicate. This would obviously have a great impact on a lot of other things that one could speculate on, but probably impossible to prove.
I tend to think that all languages have some sort of gender-indexed differences so these effects are going to exist in all cultures, but it is the accretion of cultural behavior/norms rather than something in the chromosones.
On “The law of the letter”
Couple of links
https://www.educationworld.com/a_admin/admin/admin074.shtml
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0020739X.2019.1614688#d1e163
There are a ton of pdfs as well.
"
I’m on my phone, so can’t give links, but I encourage a dive into how japanese teach math vs US methods. A couple of points I remember:
-in the US, people who are goid at math get pushed into teaching math, so they often don’t understand why students make the mistakes they do. A large component of Japanese math education is predictive, so a good teacher should know where students are likely to go off the rails and adjust their teaching
-a passing grade in Japan is 60, which is good for math, if you understand 60% of some concepts, that’s not too bad, and the bulk of math education happens in hs. I recall I was involved with an exchange program that sent selected prefectural students to BC. One student was from one of the lower ranking schools, and was considered the weakest candidate academically. Wasn’t a bad kid, but was on the baseball team, so 95% of his effort was on the baseball field. He went to a BC high school where classes were in mid term and had to take a math test because that was scheduled and everyone was astonished because he had a perfect score.
-students in japan still aren’t permitted to use calculators
-they also don’t give partial credit, which is how I got thru my math courses.
Will try and toss some links tomorrow
"
Charles, I gotta ask, don’t you wonder about quoting an LLM that can call itself ‘MechaHitler’?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/why-does-the-ai-powered-chatbot-grok-post-false-offensive-things-on-x
"
Charles, I gotta ask, don’t you wonder about quoting an LLM that can call itself ‘MechaHitler’?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/why-does-the-ai-powered-chatbot-grok-post-false-offensive-things-on-x
"
I'm not sure if I'd be so harsh on the Roman alphabet. You don't want a system that encodes everything.
Something that floors my students is when I teach them about an abcedary, which is a chart that represents the letters by giving them a word that has the sound (A is for apple, etc) Because Japanese kana are the sound they represent, there is no need to create one.
About Michael's question, I think it would work in romanized Japanese because it is essentially creating an anglicized version of Japanese and the consonants plus the context can give enough clues to read them. However, Japanese don't process near as much text in roman letters, so that would be an issue.
"
A couple of things about reading. It's a bit like second language acquisition, in that no one is guaranteed to acquire reading. There is a basic idea that reading is a interactive process that bounces back and forth between bottom up and top down, but beyond that, there is not much. There is an notion of orthographic depth, but it's often by speakers of one language (usually English) projecting onto other languages.
I tend to think of it a lot like umwelt, which is the unique subjective experience that an organism has that can not be understood by any other organism. Though it doesn't use the word, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" by Thomas Nagel gets at that point. I'll leave it to Harmut to explain umwelt, along with merkwelt and wirkwelt in Uexküll's biosemiotic theory and I've never heard of any linguist taking this up, but I definitely will in another life where I am multi-lingual...
"
It occurs to me that a lot of education should be guiding people to what they are good at. I always thought I was good at languages, but I realize that I am really good at the languages that are in roman letters. Had I known, I might have opted for vietnamese instead of thai, or even earlier, dove into chinese first (I have several english native friends who have fluency in Japanese and Chinese and all of them did Chinese first and I don’t know anyone who went the opposite way).
On “An open thread on July 4th”
FWIW, Donald, I didn't take lj's initial commentary as being aimed at you in particular, but rather being more meta-commentary about the current media environment.
Yes, I know it may have been a shock, I do meta-commentary so rarely that everyone was probably totally confused. (I am assuming we are all channelling Joni Ernst at this point)
"
Btw, I just looked and Welsh’s most recent posts are about Trump’s crazed tariff policies towards Brazil and the other one is about Epstein. Neither sounds rightwing. He despises Trump as vehemently as anyone here.
Last one from me. I did not say Welsh was right wing. I don't think he is right wing. I'm not claiming he is right wing. And I'm not disagreeing with him because he is or is not right wing. I am just saying that what you are doing with him is the same that the fox news viewer is doing when they react to the last immigrant is taking our social security chryon.
You keep telling us that you don't see why we are so down on twitter/X, you don't see any algorithm at work etc. But the algorithm is not based on whether something is accurate or not, it is based on how well it can push your buttons. Getting you more reactive is what it does.
Welsh is buying into that when he asks you to subscribe and tries to monetize this. You buy into that when you say you had never heard of Hüseyin Doğru, but damn, this really reinforces your opinion of government.
There`s nothing to really do about it in the larger world, but you may want to consider my point rather than reflexively assume I am classifying Welsh as right wing, (I'm not) or assume that everyone knows LGM has a stable of writers so we can treat them all the same.(does everyone?)
and that's the last I'll speak of Welsh.
"
You didn’t explain what is wrong with taking on Welsh’s bias in this case.
I'm not really sure we are talking about the same thing. I'm talking about Welsh's overall bias in that he wants to be right and he wants to tell everyone so. Neither of us knows anything about Hüseyin Doğru, so neither of us can comment intelligently, but if Germany is going too far, stepping back a bit, we can see how it comes about. Germany, given its history, not only the Holocaust, but also Munich, has a lot to overcome and it is understandable that pro Israel bias, along with the forceful campaign to equate any questioning of Israel with anti-semitism makes me wonder about the idea that Germany is simply doing this as a way of repressing voices. Making this out to be simply an argument about what levers government should use misses that whole problematic history. So it's hard to ignore that bias for me. YMMV
I kind of feel that the attitude that Welsh puts out is the same attitude that has someone like a Robert Kennedy or a Tulsi Gabbard effortlessly slide from left to right.
About LGM, I have noted that I avoid the comments and I've also posted about how I feel uncomfortable with Loomis' take no prisoners attitude. I don't know how the other front pagers feel, though when things get really bad in the comments, it does bubble up to the front page. It's pretty remarkable to have the situation where it looks like a front pager is trolling the commentators, but I do think a lot of their issues are not their political position, it is the speed at which conversation goes on over there, and the underlying snarkiness, which tends to magnify a lot of differences. So when you talk about the blog in that aspect, as I think you are when you talk about a 'certain atmosphere', I agree, but when you say "I fall about halfway between him and the LGM lefties" it sounds to me like you are suggesting the bloggers there occupy a point on the political spectrum, which I don't see.
About Epstein, your link says this
There are so many explanations and unanswered questions raised by the release, which also says that there is “no credible evidence … that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions.” That means that the theories alleging Epstein was operating some kind of operation to collect incriminating information for a foreign government (most notably the Israelis) has also been dismissed by the U.S. government.
A friend on facebook noted that Ghislaine Maxwell's father, Robert Maxwell, was given a state funeral in Israel and that what Epstein did bore all the marks of what an intelligence agency would do to get leverage. Being in that framework, there was another post that zoomed that was someone posting a tweet from someone saying that they lived in an area where there were a lot of Russian émigrés and there was a noticable absence of ICE agents. So I do wonder.
"
Yeah, sorry about that.
"
I would push back a bit on lumping LGM all together. I won't do a deep dive into each poster, but it's not really fair to suggest that there is one viewpoint when there are multiple authors.
Welch, on the other hand, is one person, so presumably (unless he has guest posters) his blog represents his view. The question of what kind of financial levers the government should use is an interesting question, and the case of Hüseyin Doğru seems pretty bad, but the problem is not the government using those levers, it is that what is happening is basically piggybacked on possibly the most incendiary question, the I/P one, which has a longer history than two other hot questions, abortion and the issue of trans There are others, the question of how much government is appropriate might be another, what racism is, what sexism is, but those problems have some definitional issues, where it is difficult to draw a line around what evidence should be considered.
Welsh seems more interested in being right than in understanding. He starts off with well, he didn't like the truckers strike, but he was opposed to freezing their accounts. and now, 10 years later, he has been proven correct! So yeah, you can learn a lot from other sources, but you need to be careful about taking on their biases.
"
Just to be clear, my point wasn't about using cryptocurrency, it was about the fact that a government has to control transactions for a number of reasons that are necessary and working with my student about how the EU is looking at controlling cryptocurrency suggests you are going to have the ways to control that will end up like Chekhov's gun.
"
I hadn't seen or didn't remember Ian Welch. The information about Hüseyin Doğru (love the diacritics!) is interesting, but I'm working online with a masters student who is researching how cryptocurrency legislation should be handled and Welch is not really thinking why the German government can do what it can. Like Donald, I don't know anything about the case, but I don't think it is realistic to expect nations to simply stay with cash money. One thing I like about Japan is that it is much more a cash economy than what Germany sounds like, but it's not clear to me if he wants Germany to be more like Japan, which I guess he imagines would clear up the problem, or wants the Government to put some guardrails because that will deal with the problem? It's not really clear.
Here's a website where Hüseyin Doğru is discussing it
https://diem25.org/en/author/huseyin-dogru/
But I can't get the page to load.
"
It became all the harder to comment when there were several comments aimed at me that I wasn't completely responding to some of the counterpoint.
I feel you. I only participate in the comments of this blog because in other blogs, there is an often an assumption that everyone is in the same room/time zone and people push the advantage without thinking of that. The way I write comments grows out of that, trying to put down enough for people to chew on, but also trying to slow down the pace of the conversation, at least where I am wading in and why I often suggest that piling on is not really so good.
A bit of unsolicited advice, it's always possible to say something like 'let me put a pin in that, and give me a day or two to reply. Some people may just ignore that and try to get in their licks, but most of the people here would understand that (and would probably think less of the people not accepting that)
"
wj's comment reminds me of Ena Matsuoka, a member of Japanese girl idol group
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/people/article/3052704/japanese-sex-pest-jailed-stalking-pop-idol-ena-matsuoka-using
A Japanese man has been sentenced to 30 months in prison for stalking and assaulting an up-and-coming pop idol after finding clues to where she lived by enlarging reflections of scenery and landmarks in her eyes in photographs she shared on social media.
"
Hartmut, sorry, I dropped in and saw your post, but thought one had been freed. I think we put a textblock on He of the oven made of masonry units, so that may be why, though Russell did post the name twice, so I'm not sure.
"
About what topics get people's dander up, I'd go to Martin Luther's observation that "Most human affairs come down to depending upon whose ox is gored." The earth being flat is not on the list of most people's oxen, but other topics can end up being more ox-like.
"
A couple of observations. I'm probably a/the fly in the ointment. I'm happy to discuss things, but I am pretty big on examining unexamined assumptions. I'll try and illustrate this with an example that's on me.
GftNC and I had an exchange on manipulate and draw out. However, I went back to the comment and I said in the very same comment
What I see (after reflection) was that it was becoming evident to me that it was a loser on the internet pretending to be someone else because they couldn't have a proper conversation with adults and admit they were wrong and that the said loser was pulling your strings.
GftNC could say I was wasn't being honest, cause "pulling strings" conjures up the image of a marionette. But I hope that the full quote shows that I'm making the assumption that she wouldn't have started the conversation if she knew she was just being recruited as a foot soldier in the war on cultural Marxism. But she was right to point that out. Hopefully, we won't have to worry about sockpuppets for a while.
Unfortunately, a lot of arguing on the internet takes running off the other side as winning. While that was true for folks like Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon, not so true now. The whole concept of sealioning springs from this, but it shares a notion with other similar interactions, which is to goad a person taking one side of the argument into blowing up and then taking the moral high ground.
From this, I think that it isn't so much the topic, it is the way the argument is processed. I was looking at the old posts and the big debate was gay marriage, which invited as much feeling back then.
Another thing, I imagine some people were a bit taken aback by Charles' text file of our ages, which seems a bit Stasi-like. In a lot of places, especially if people don't have much of a reason to play nice, there would have been fireworks at the comment giving the age range. 'how the F would you know that?' might have been a response. But I'm pretty pleased that this didn't happen here. I can't speak for others, but the whole thing seemed very Charles-like.
"
And going forward from that post, the three original bloggers here were Moe Lane, Katherine and von.
"
If you are talking about the original crew, that was before my time, but we had Hilzoy, Katherine (who did pro bono work for detainees) and Publius who probably wouldn't be put in a Iraq war hawk box. I would try and take a look, but the whole Typepad architecture is very slow and creaky.
But I can pull up the first blog post in case you want a starting point.
https://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2003/11/howdy_howdy_how.html
which has this
Second, this is not, strictly speaking, a Right-wing blog: it's pretty much a centrist one. While I carry my Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy card with pride, my fellow-bloggers do not. They aren't froth-at-the-mouth Bush-haters, mind you - which will probably disqualify them as being on the Left for a very small yet vocal group of people - but they are most assuredly not Republicans. I look forward to their insights and challenges to my own ideological leanings. I also have a somewhat larger list of people (of varying political beliefs) whom I'm going to hit up for special guest posts from time to time: but for at least the start, three bloggers is probably an optimal number to regularly post here.
Again, this is before I was here, but my understanding is that Moe Lane started the blog, and he was on the conservative side, and worked hard to get voices from the other side, which then moved the blog to the left of center slant it has today.
Talking about good old days, during Iraq/Afgahnistan/Libya, a common plaint (out on the internet) was gee, I wish we could go back to the old Cold War days.
On “From the Chinatalk substack”
LOL. I guess there's a reason the Hippocratic oath is supposed to start with 'first do no harm' (a wikipedia check says it ain't so
Although it is often said that "First do no harm" (Latin: Primum non nocere) is a part of the original Hippocratic oath, no such phrase from which "First" or "Primum" can be translated appears in the text of the original oath, although a similar intention is vowed by, "I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm". Another related phrase is found in Epidemics, Book I, of the Hippocratic school: "Practice two things in your dealings with disease: either help or do not harm the patient". and it likely took shape from longstanding popular nonmedical expression.
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