- > The reason why families need two incomes nowadays is that our standards for what's "needed" have grown
Nope! It happened almost instantly after Bretton Woods system collapsed. And that wasn't because our living standards changed much, it's cause practically unbounded monetary inflation was embraced as the new standard.
Instead of benefitting from the price deflation afforded by technological progress, governments decided to debase their currencies to finance their centrally planned schemes. Combined with the relatively high transaction cost of finding a new job gave us a world where wages have stagnated.
- Well I've got confirmed dysbiosis (GBT) from overprescribed antibiotics and from my experience, and reading up in those communities you're so contemptuous about, I get the sense that gut dysfunction manifests in seemingly random ways, a whole constellation of weird symptoms. You just feel horrible, sometimes there's no clear cause and effect, it seems random.
I agree there is a lot of just blatant nonsense and maybe they do misuse leaky gut but I think the medical community has a habit of vilifying people who are suffering real problems. I can't tell you how many times I've had a real medical issue (be it a bacterial infection, virus, or most recently, gut dysbiosis) and my doctor blames it on anxiety and offers me lexapro.
- > Stop being such a lazy thinker. The world is complicated.
Please don't ad hominem and strawman instead of engaging my arguments.
> [...] relying on the reader's brain to conjure up a couple of salient instances like Iraq and Afghanistan and ignoring everything else that's happened in the entire world and outside of their cherry-picked window
Iraq and Afghanistan is just a couple of salient instances? It's literally the defining catastrophes of the 21st century, an extremely large, modern, reason for why trust in government has plummeted and there's this cynical sense of helplessness and failure with respect to practically every institution.
You're fighting some imaginary object of your contempt, the "generic libertarian". I'm arguing there's ubiquitous seemingly inevitable failures related to the unbounded scope and mission-creep of government, and you're calling that all idealistic nonsense. Well I have a right to pose my assessment of reality in an open forum of ideas, you can respond substantively but instead it seems you're tilting at windmills.
- I never said we need to burn down government.
That's a very large strawman you just argued.
I'm saying that successful government is limited in nature. And that overgrown government usually not only fails to achieve its goals, it does more harm than were they absent. Look at the past 20 years of military intervention, for example.
> Of course when you do that, you're usually just transferring power from an entity that the public has some limited control over, to an entity that the public has no control over.
This isn't even remotely true. All if not most of our regulatory bodies & bureaucracies are beholden to lobbyists and special interests, so how exactly is that entrenched and unimpeachable corruption more accountable than private interests that are at least subject to competition? Say what you will, but the monopoly power of government is far greater than any private business in my opinion. One has a world-dominating military.
- This is very conspiratorial and generalizing. Everyone paints the right as conspiracy crazy but the left usually gets away with discussing their own conspiracies unchallenged. Marxism (along with all the other anti-capitalist tropes) is fundamentally a conspiracy theory, for instance.
Not to mention you claim that all these small business owners are anti-immigration yet they don't want labor laws? That seems contradictory since labor laws are usually enacted as a protectionist measure. If anything immigration in all of its forms is essential for small and big business alike since it provides cheap labor.
- > Note that "leaky gut syndrome" is pseudoscience; there's no such thing recognized by the medical community. What is real is leaky gut, or intestinal permeability.
This seems like oversubtle reasoning that cruelly dismisses legitimate suffering from an actual disease process.
You seem to admit there's a convincing scientific basis.
Leaky gut syndrome is pseudoscience but intestinal permeability is real? Ok. It seems like medical science isn't advanced enough to sort out most gut disease, it manifests in somewhat strange and seemingly mysterious ways, and people suffering are left to discuss amongst themselves online in order to find some relief after being shrugged away by doctors (or worse hurt by inappropriate medical procedures/medicines like antibiotics, etc.).
So instead of just condescendingly labelling them anti-science whackos ("pseudoscience"), perhaps we should be compassionate and recognize the condition?
- > Good will, honesty, and, proper information hygiene do not scale
What does that say about "democracy" and collectivist politics more broadly?
- Limited in scope, it’s an important ideal, hard to ever achieve. The more an organization expands its scope, the more certainly it will not only fail to achieve its goals but do great harm.
- > only now they aren't even beholden to democracy
Except practically everyone considers our representatives next to useless - look at congress’s approval rating. That’s why if anything local government is the most important. It’s the most limited, fundamentally, and capable of being reformed & truly representative.
Democracy doesn’t even ensure that power isn’t abused, if anything it gives the false impression that abusive power is legitimate because there was an election.
- > It appears this is just the way the system is set up.
The wisdom of limited government is that any sufficiently powerful political organization will be corrupted and abused. There is no force worse than corrupted political power. Businesses come and go relatively quickly but governments metastasize and ossify.
- > Either you're completely broken and it's so obvious what's wrong with you that you barely need a doctor, or you're partially broken in which case doctors know very little and rely on experience, murky clues, and their gut.
> This made sense once I realized doctors know much less about the human body then they pretend to.
I find myself agreeing with this so strongly. Couldn't have put it better myself.
Further - I've suffered way worse harm relying on the medical system than the disease (mycoplasma genitalium infection) I had to arduously & painstakingly diagnose on my own (and even treatment was botched by my doctor, I had to insist that I be treated with the CDC recommendation as opposed to his outdated prescription).
I don't mean to say they're useless, far from it. In acute care they're the best we've got and they often perform miracles, but for chronic issues (by definition something medicine doesn't have the capability to fix) it's so often a horrible situation.
And there's such a strong force to silence criticism of the system.
- I mean it in the context of people who have joint pain that’s not from injury. And yes endotoxins are linked to joint pain:
- > That isn't what a meta analysis is. I'm not trying to be cruel[...]
That's why he didn't call it a meta-analysis but instead said "It’s more of a meta analysis in my mind of all the different studies and anecdotes I’ve osmoted over the years"
It'd be one thing if he said all those things as some sort of scientific fact, but he very clearly qualified his statements as hypothetical conclusions informed by surveying literature, reading developments and other things.
By saying "I'm not trying to be cruel" you seem to be at least aware that you're being pretty censorious. It seems misplaced to me.
- IIRC inflammation is linked to endotoxins produced by bacteria in the gut. Apparently curcumin has a good reputation for helping people with inflammatory conditions like that. And it's been proposed that it yields positive benefits by modulating the gut rather than being bioactive (curcumin is famously not bioactive).
- That's what happens when central planning is used to warp...erm, I mean organize...an economy.
- But you're saying raw milk shouldn't be consumed. Though raw fish is fine?
- Should we ban sushi or raw seafood?
- It's pretty much inconceivable to most people that Fauci committed gross malfeasance, but the evidence has only grown over time.
It's the sort of thing that would melt minds and violate the sense of reality for far too many people.
- So we've still got high inflation, and the fed seems like it's only got so long until it'll resume pumping money into the economy.
- > It’s silly theater. Like a lot of medicine was and is.
can you at least explain why it's "silly theater"?
- > you can't really call it "wrong"
I can call censorship wrong whether private or public, thank you very much. And I can agree and actually support their rights to do it as a private company. There's no contradiction there.
> you can't ask someone "please take this political spectrum questionnaire"
I'm not saying they should, I'm saying that it is an extreme hypocrisy that the pro-diversity, anti-systemic bias crowd seems to be completely mum about their own glaring systemic bias. There is a very high value in having viewpoint diversity where there are people in your organization capable of offering insights where the majority has a complete blind-spot. Instead viewpoint diversity is squashed and people who don't toe the party line are vilified.
Genuine disagreement should be embraced in organizations but all too often people are not afforded the dignity of their own sense of judgement.
- > education-influenced tendency is more of a positive systemic bias than a negative one
If anything, there's evidence that education has a negative influence in ways you may not expect. I seem to recall Germany being the birthplace of the modern university, "Humboldt's Ideal," and we all know how they ended up. In fact, doctors in Germany were 7x more likely than the average citizen to join the Nazi party. [1]
And the issue is more about disposition, the educated seem to have an extreme blind-spot because, as your argument evidences, they tend to think so highly of themselves. They also have the mental machinery capable of producing very enticing & sophisticated, but ultimately wrong justifications for horrible things. And in combination with a self-righteous moral self-concept, you're playing with some real fire.
Read C.S. Lewis's God in the Dock, I'll quote:
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
- So you're admitting that basically this entire sector of the economy is a monoculture, but downplaying that there's any negative systemic bias cause that's somehow just a deterministic function of geography.
Precisely. The world has never been safer or as rich, and it seems like my generation is extremely lacking in independence.
Everyone has to be told to do things, it's like they have no concept of what to do without being commanded. I feel like many simply can't come up with answers on their own. No one can answer the question of how a person should their life. It's subjective. But like a muscle, it's completely atrophied. When you're never given independence, you don't recognize how to listen to your own desires or judgement.
For me this explains perfectly the underlying situation behind the overbearing paternalism (from society & government) that so many apparently desire now.