profeatur

Someone hasn’t seen what Spanish cities look like outside the casco viejo…

Source: the beneficiaries of such fraud, were it to occur…

That’s what nearly all UE regulation is. Most of these regulators are on the payroll of 200 year old companies who maintain their control of the economy by preventing any real challengers from rising.

> It's so naive to think that Meta/Google(Youtube) doesn't have power to manipulate people's opinion

We have that here too, except in our case it’s the government using the good old fashioned medium of television.

Well, most things, considering the absolutely pathetic average salary, the rising cost of living, and the ever-increasing tax burden.

Unhealthy people get left behind in Europe all the time. I hope as a European you’ll never have to go through the hell of trying to deal with any kind of complex chronic illness. The doctors have no clue how to treat these kinds of problems, and any specialists are very few and far between. Go spend some time on forums for people dealing with chronic health problems and you’ll find many Europeans who’ve had to empty out their savings in order to get treatment.

Yes, there is a public health system, but people tend to avoid it when they can. Most opt to go private for their dental, for example. And if they have any kind of systematic (sibo, ibs, autoimmune, etc) problem the public system is useless and they will have to travel to find a private specialist. On the other hand, the private system is really good here, and also pretty cheap.

The divide goes back even further than the USSR.

The enlightenment era gave us two separate definitions of freedom. At its foundation, the US govt is granted whatever rights it has to constrain freedom by wholly autonomous and free individuals, and in the other (French, continental) conception freedom is both defined and granted by the state. Authoritarianism is baked into the definition.

It will take future historians living in more intellectually permissive times to give a full account as to why the first concept of freedom only ever took root in the US and why the majority of countries have adopted the second.

Europeans will continue to buy the hardware, except rather than being able to afford the Apple devices they’ll buy some very low quality knockoffs from Shein.

>liveable work conditions

How does low pay affect the “liveability” of work conditions? A waitress in the US makes as much or more than a software engineer in most of the EU. While the EU worker may receive more vacation time, and while he certainly has better personal financial skills (poverty will do that to you), he has no path towards a better future. A blue collar American worker, in the (increasingly unlikely) event that he chooses to manage his money well, can end up wealthy. A European who isn’t born wealthy will never become wealthy.

>public healthcare

Which everyone avoids, if they can afford it. The private system is really good though.

>parental leave

Because of the cost and risk of employing someone in the EU, when an employee takes maternity leave it’s the other employees who end up having to do the missing employee’s work. This is especially true with small businesses.

>communist nightmare

Over-socialized neo-feudal peasants who embrace their own impoverishment because they’ve been convinced that they’re superior to everyone else is pretty dystopian.

Twenty years ago it was quite expensive for an American to visit Europe. Typically only the upper middle class could afford it. Since then the European system has become stagnant and for every US tech company that’s ballooned in value many thousands of investors have become wealthy.

In Europe, the average person has no recourse (or will) to take advantage of the wealth creation that’s taking place elsewhere. In fact people seem to think that the economy is a zero-sum game. Economic illiteracy reigns. The public healthcare system is not even good. Anyone who can afford to goes private, and if you have any kind of problem that’s not well-known (like SIBO) you will have to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket in order to heal yourself. Housing is far more expensive relative to wages. Taxes are far higher than anywhere else (the middle class pays the majority of the taxes in Europe). Most of the population subscribes to some form of “enlightened” atheist humanism or hedonism, but due to low fertility and immigration, the population will soon be replaced by Muslims. People go to visit and marvel at Cathedrals and other great works of their ancestors but then refuse to ask themselves why they’re incapable of making anything of such value today. It’s true that the high-speed rail is very convenient, but in the end its tourists who benefit most from this, and those tourists are increasingly foreign.

Meanwhile, many words are spilled over electronic media by overly-socialized Europeans and the corrupt elite who lord over them about how great Europe is compared to everywhere else. European cities top the “best in the world” lists while the native people who actually live here struggle to improve their lives.

How long will Europeans continue to delude themselves into believing the Reddit-view of the world?

It will be interesting to find out why Cortes is depicted as a Roman. Considering the church inventory, it reminds me of the Holy Week processions in Spain where you often see people dressed as roman soldiers.

+1. Even if many of the mid-twentieth century French philosophers were incomprehensible and self-contradictory, they certainly provided a lot of useful raw material for more grounded thinkers like De Landa.

170,000 terawatts of free solar energy per day has to go somewhere…

People who think the world works on facts have a hard time grokking LLMs. With chatgpt you find solutions to problems the same way you do with humans: through conversation. Personally, chatgpt has revolutionized my work flow, both in that it prints out code that does what I want it to do, and it also helps me figure out how to frame my problems in a way that’s actually solvable.

This is generally true, except that it’s not necessary to travel to the US. You can see a local private doctor or dentist (often accredited by a US university, using US developed medical technology) locally.

>wrongdoers This goes all ways. The USSR had their hands in Spanish politics. Spain’s extensive gold reserves were drained and shipped off to Moscow, for instance.

Spain was dragged into a political and economic system with no real organic connection to the country. Democracy here has always been a farce. During covid the leftist government enacted some of the most draconian lockdowns in the world, and there was zero pushback from the kind of people who seethe over Franco. Also, the government is many times larger than it ever was during Franco (hence more control), the economy is relatively worse off, and the fertility rate is in a death spiral.

>humans for the majority of existence… This is not globally true. Animal products have always been the most important part of the Northern European diet. Earlier, nomadic herders in Asia and Europe ate primarily animal products (while famously conquering every sedentary civilization they came across). Ötzi, the 5300 year old mummy found in the alps, had a stomach full of meat. Going back further, hunter gatherers traditionally derived most of their calories from animal products, and Neanderthals had a completely carnivore diet.

Depends on what you replace it with. For the majority of people less beef means more soy, more seed oils, or more chicken (the meat most easily modifiable by modern industrial techniques).

The consequence is low muscle mass and high body fat (skinny fat), chronic health issues and screwed up hormone profiles.

People below the age of 29 are still likely to believe what they were taught in school, and haven’t yet suffered the consequences of the lifestyle they’ve been told their whole lives is more healthy and virtuous.

Covid broke our institutional reality. There's clearly something about the events of the last two years that's caused a large segment of the population to instinctively reject what we're being told by authorities of all stripes. The whole issue has been so hopelessly obfuscated by political, economic and media interests that numbers simply don't matter. They've lost our confidence. Competent leaders would realize that you aren't going to change XX% of the population's minds by coercion, "nudging," or pathologizing. Resources would have been better spent on building more health care facilities, training more medical staff, and better/cheaper rapid testing.

Two years of lockdowns, reckless spending, mandatory vaccinations, extreme media gaslighting. Soon there will be real consequences to these simplistic and heavy-handed authoritarian measures, and they're going to be of much greater significance than covid itself. And when they do come to pass the midwits will cry, "We couldn't have known!"

Wittgenstein's ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler’s reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler. The less you trust the ruler’s reliability, the more information you are getting about the ruler and the less about the table.

There are too many political, economic, and social incentives involved in propagating this new vaccine to say anything about it with the least bit of certainty. The fact that so many are presenting such an uncertain topic with such certainty itself carries a signal.

The only thing that will solve this uncertainty is time.

There's a difference between "vaccines work," and the vaccine specifically developed for COVID works. Most of us who are skeptical of the second statement are not skeptical of the first. The snake oil is in the discourse.

I’d be less hesitant to take the vaccine if midwits weren’t so eager to convince me that science says what I know science cannot say.

You equate those values with the systemic regulation of them.

Id argue that Christianity is inherently conservative. Christianity finds the root cause of the imperfection of our world (and the systems it contains) in original sin. One doesn’t endlessly seek an answer for why systems eventually fail or bad things happen, because one recognizes that ultimately everything in this world suffers imperfection. For progressivism, original sin is open-ended, thereby allowing for any particular powerful entity to control what is considered the source of evil.

The Christian, by embracing the absurd belief of original sin, recognizes that ultimately even formal thought becomes informal. His belief protects him from the hubris of thinking that he has the power to fix what cannot ever be fixed. The progressive, by definition, must always be seeking a way “forward”, and in doing so tends to believe in other, more harmful absurd beliefs.

The sad truth is that the people in this situation lack shame. They lack the sadness that you feel when you see the way they live. They will take what you give them, and then they will take more. They will make you feel guilty for not giving enough. They will steal from you when you’re not looking. They will make you realize that beyond the external features towards which you empathize, there’s nothing inside. To whatever extent they were once alive, they’re gone now. The living dead. Their only remaining use is to be the partially sentient puppets of a childish political fantasy.

Climate change is probably happening, sure. But you’re deluding yourself if you think that we’re going to come up with a way to solve it systemically, or that anyone in power actually cares about the issue at all. The more likely outcome is that more scammy regulations are passed that don’t actually help anything except enrich government contractors and politicians while more and more negative externalities are pushed under the rug. Meanwhile the system is helped inch forward towards disaster by well-intentioned people who feel that they need to “do something.”

Whenever this topic comes up the conversation always centers around money or housing or other brute physical facts. It should be obvious by now that this problem is not about material resources but is something deeper and much more intractable.

American society has died. Many here will reply that that’s a good thing, and then continue complaining about the wealth divide or housing or whatever else fits their political agenda.

The world is a dark place and we are fragile creatures. Through technological hubris and the idea of “progress” we’ve destroyed the balance our ancestors maintained. The System has tried for over 100 years to take on more and more of the family’s roles, and even though it’s incapable of providing us with what we really need, it’s strong-armed us all into believing it’s been a success, and that this is what progress looks like, and that this progress is the greatest good.

Society proceeds from the family. The family is the center of a human’s life, and we’ve destroyed it. Divorce, broken homes, a lack of tribal cohesion, a lack of god, a total lack of all autonomy unless you’re one of the lucky few who have the ability to find it within abstractions. In this new anomic landscape parents become shadows. They have nothing to provide us because they are also confused. The filament that once held families together through generations has been snipped and there’s no way we can reconnect it now. We look away from our families and attach ourselves to a reactionary “culture” that’s completely fabricated out of the whims of the moment rather than being a mesh work that develops over time. We identity ourselves with our own coping mechanisms. We forsake the past because our ancestors were strong but it’s a kind of strength we’ve been taught to deny, because that kind of strength is dangerous to the System.

The only thing connecting us now is our sickness.

Do you live in Europe? The last thing we need is more regulation. I can almost guarantee that whatever law they pass is only going to make it harder for those of us actually trying to start up businesses here.

I think it’s more likely a natural human response to the lack of autonomy we experience in the modern world. Especially during childhood we are forced to live our lives on rails, and we have no power to change the circumstances we find ourselves in nor to feel the innate pleasure of having solved problems with direct consequences. Animals in zoos develop strange behavior patterns. Why should we expect to be any different?

The irony is that these very same people who’ve been most damaged by the system choose to make themselves more dependent on it, and are also the ones who help it to strip more autonomy from all of our lives.