Sadoeconomist

34 / Male / Northwest Washington State. Hierophant of Thot. My areas of expertise are economics, libertarian politics, BDSM, and video games. I'm also into polyamory, science fiction, atheism, heavy metal, firearms, and space. Yeah, I'm that guy. At least I'm funny. This was...

[norincomak-deactivated20180103]

[sadoeconomist]

can't see your reply on that post, only that you left it -_-

Yeah, I think I got blocked immediately by the OP. I don't know why, I thought my comment was quite helpful! I said that they mentioned their art was digital, so that meant that if it was taken from them, it must have been remotely deleted from their hard drive by hackers. And I suggested posting their art online so many people could freely download their own copies of it, so they wouldn't lose access to it if it was erased like that. I wonder why that made them upset.

[max1461]

Starting a new thread for this topic:

@ghostpalmtechnique said:

On what basis do you claim that Jesus was *unambiguously* historical?

Well, basically what I meant is that he’s considered to be historical by the vast majority of scholars—both Christian and non-Christian—who study early Christianity. Mythicism is an extreme minority position. But maybe “unambiguous” is the wrong word for this. Naturally, it’s hard to get truly incontrovertible evidence for the existence of someone who lived 2000 years ago. I should have said that the evidence for a historical Jesus is comparable to the evidence for the historicity of other famous figures from the era, who are themselves widely regarded as unambiguously historical. That doesn’t mean their historicity is impossible to challenge—if you wanted to doubt the historicity of, idk, Livy, you probably could, but why would you? It’s not anywhere near the most parsimonious explanation. Likewise with Jesus. For most of these figures, people are perfectly comfortable saying “yeah, that guy was probably real, it’s the simplest explanation and I have no real reason to think otherwise”. But for Jesus, there is a strong desire to go “no, he was made up, he was just a really good hoax/the result of an accidental misunderstanding/etc.”, despite there being no particular reason to think this.

Jesus, and Christians more generally, are mentioned in Roman sources (Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger) in the early second century, about ~80 years after Jesus’s death. This indicates, at least, that belief in the Jesus story was at this point widespread. Christian sources (the gospels) mention him even earlier, by the 70s AD (30-40 years after his death), and there’s no evidence to suggest that the gospel authors are part of a conspiracy to invent a Jesus story; by all accounts they indeed believe in him, and are writing are least partially for an audience of other Christians who already believe in him. These are people who are probably, at most, one or two degrees of separation from Jesus himself, in terms of who initially converted them. It’s not clear how a whole-cloth invention of Jesus on such a scale would have worked within such a time-frame. Beyond that, early Christianity emerged out of a broader category of apocalyptic Judaism in the ancient Mediterranean world, and individuals claiming prophethood or Messianic status in this tradition don’t seem to have been uncommon, so there is no a priori reason to be doubtful that Jesus may have existed and been one of them.

All together, Jesus mythicism seems like a strictly less parsimonious explanation for early Christian history, and this is reflected in the fact that most scholars of the period don’t endorse it.

[dagny-hashtaggart-deactivated20]

Mostly devil’s advocate, as I think it’s a good deal more likely than not that someone of the general description of Jesus of Nazareth existed (though there are few details of his biography that I’d definitely endorse), but I am looking a bit askance at

“evidence for a historical Jesus is comparable to the evidence for the historicity of other famous figures from the era, who are themselves widely regarded as unambiguously historical.”

There are a fair number of figures who have pieces of writing credibly attributed specifically to them, were written to and about by their contemporaries in extant texts, were the subjects of artwork we believe to have been made during their lifetimes, and so on. Julius and Augustus come immediately to mind, for instance, or many of the more prominent classical Hellenic philosophers (but not Socrates). That strikes me as a good deal more certain than someone who was not written about at all during his lifetime in any surviving source.

I’d say something in the neighborhood of 99.9% chance that Julius Caesar existed, 90% chance Jesus did.

[dagny-hashtaggart-deactivated20]

sadoeconomist

I think it’s incorrect to say that there’s no evidence that the gospel authors are part of a conspiracy to invent a Jesus story, the clearly fictional nature of the Gospels (written using ring structure, etc.) implies exactly that, and they had to make up a guy to fit the preexisting prophecies about the Messiah which led to a lot of the contradictions in the gospels as the later authors corrected embarrassing inconsistencies in earlier works

I’ll admit I’m always a little confused when people cite the gospels as the primary evidence that Jesus was fabricated by a conspiracy, given that historians are largely in agreement that they aren’t the earliest extant Christian texts. Even most estimated datings for the putative Q source (assuming it was a document and not purely an oral tradition) put it after the earlier of the legitimate Pauline epistles. The evidence there and elsewhere for the existence of early Christian communities well before the publication of the gospels militates against the idea of Christianity as a conspiracy.

I’m also not clear as to why making up a guy to fit existing prophecies is a more convincing claim than falsifying the biography of an actual guy to fit those prophecies. This seems neither strong evidence for nor strong evidence against the existence of a historical Jesus.

Further, structuring non-fictional works in a manner similar to fiction was pretty common in the ancient world, and reading that as evidence of an organized conspiracy seems fundamentally anachronistic. Similarly, the process of editing and redaction over time was hardly alien to documents people at the time took as legitimate works of history. Again, I think this should lead us to doubt many of the specific claims made in the gospels, not just about obvious things like miracles but also about dates and events, but it’s not good evidence for a conspiracy to invent a messiah out of whole cloth.

[sadoeconomist]

I don't see why the existence of Pauline epistles and Christian communities prior to the gospels necessarily militates against the idea that there was a conspiracy to invent a historical Jesus. What I think is that Jesus was likely a mythological figure already worshipped by some Hellenized Jews as a personal savior and light-side mirror of Lucifer (in one of many cults of personal salvation kicking around the Mediterranean at the time) and the gospels were created to argue that this figure also incarnated as a human a while back and already fulfilled all the prophecies and became the Messiah, and therefore you don't have to deal with those jerks at the temple anymore and you should donate all your worldly possessions directly to us, and uncircumcised gentiles are welcome to pay too.

The legitimate Pauline epistles predating the gospels never actually imply that Jesus was a historical person and he always appears in visions like a mythological being - what they have to say about him and what they fail to mention is very weird if Paul is talking about an actual religious leader that died within living memory of some of his audience.

I don't think there's a meaningful difference between making up a guy and completely falsifying the biography of a guy. You're just giving a fictional character the name of a real person at that point. I don't think that's what people are saying when they think Jesus was a real historical figure though - they're saying that the gospels had to be inspired by actual events surrounding a guy named Jesus that were perhaps somewhat embellished in fitting with the normal practices of ancient historians and couldn't just be religious fantasy fiction written entirely for Christian polemical purposes with no more basis in reality than Dante's Inferno, Paradise Lost, the Chronicles of Narnia, or the Left Behind series.

I'd compare it to if maybe around 1900, a series of Mormons wrote several editions of a story about the angel Moroni incarnating as a human and going on adventures with Joseph Smith and the LDS Church started teaching them as factual, and then in the year 4000, it was commonly believed by historians of Mormon studies (many of whom work for Mormon universities that would fire them if they ever publicly said Moroni never existed) that Moroni must have been based on an actual person in 19th century America because a similar amount of documentation existed for contemporary historical figures no one doubts the existence of, like Abraham Lincoln and Paul Bunyan.

[sadoeconomist]

It's a great anime tbh

Wait, which part of that is a great anime? The first part with the 'polygynous marriages must be equally matched by polyandrous marriages' bit or the sissy hypno femboy maid part? Or is there some specific anime I accidentally referenced that did all of that?

On that subject, the best recent polyamory anime is Kanojo mo Kanojo, that one is extremely accurate to what dating multiple women at a time is actually like.

[kontextmaschine]

Re: Culture wars over plural marriage, yeah, the prospect of that + Hordes of Futureless Young Men is enough to make me go 'not fucking worth it, one spouse per customer, the Civil Rights Bus stops at Transhuman Station.

Wait so you're on board with stuff up to the frontier now but that would be too much for you?

!!! That's a promising sign, that's how it works!

[mitigatedchaos]

[ @sadoeconomist ]

Modern nonmonogamy isn't the same thing as traditional polygyny, polyandry is part of the deal as well, each horde of futureless young men can share a girlfriend/khaleesi

Yeah I’m not betting civilization on that given how rare it is historically compared to traditional polygyny, and I know you will never, ever agree to any sort of security mechanism such as “for every polygynous marriage there must be a corresponding polyandrous marriage.”

Restless young men is one of those things correlated with civil disorder, like this is textbook political science taught in university political science classes, here’s an article from The Economist, even.

There’s no point having an incel uprising for this, and trying to make it work the other way by increasing the number of women will screw up the neurotype distribution. 

We can revisit the matter once bodies and sexualities are more mutable.

[sadoeconomist]

“For every polygynous marriage there must be a corresponding polyandrous marriage” I think you just accidentally invented the greatest fanfiction trope ever.

“I know a guy who wants to marry his three weed-smoking girlfriends and so to help him out we all need to pretend to be married, and there’s only one bed’

Anyway every anti-poly argument has a corresponding anti-gay argument and the restless young men thing reminds me of the once-extremely-common argument that allowing homosexuality would destroy civilization by catastrophically lowering birthrates and that's why the government has a legitimate interest in suppressing it by force. As though 100% of the population would become gay immediately once it was legally allowed. Did you notice your implication here that most monogamously married women would actually prefer to become Chad Thundercock's nth wife instead of staying married to their beta soyboy husbands? I feel like if that were true it'd be a stronger argument for polyamory than anything else I could come up with.

The thing that's actually causing the violence in South Sudan and 'polygamous regions of Indonesia' referenced by what I could read of that paywalled article isn't polyamory, it's very clearly sectarian conflict involving a certain religion that coincidentally allows polygyny that university political science textbooks and Economist columnists aren't legally allowed to blame for anything.

Young men in Western societies who have no prospect of ever possibly having a relationship with any woman typically only cause violence and civil disorder in League of Legends.

Instead of increasing the number of women to deal with this supposed restless young men problem, let's do the next best thing, let's randomly select young men to receive thousands of hours of Pornhub sissification hypnosis video training, so that each household in the future will be made up of a man, his harem, and their staff of femboy maids - an extremely stable and harmonious social arrangement, according to anime I have watched.

[morlock-holmes]

'shouldn’t rising productivity have already pushed wages above the current minimum wage, this rendering the conversation moot?' Yes, that's exactly what happened, almost nobody actually makes the minimum wage so it has almost no effect at the moment, that's why people are talking about raising it, because it's become irrelevant. IIRC polls show the average American thinks about 30% of workers make minimum wage when the real number is under 2%.

I looked it up and that's "Around 2% of Americans make federal minimum wage or less". Given that 30 states have a state minimum wage which is higher than the federal minimum wage I'm not sure that this number tells us much in this context, particularly when people are discussing raising the federal minimum wage above the minimum of every state minimum.

In this case I think the question of how many workers are making state minimum wage would be the relevant number, although I wasn't able to find it quickly and I'm lazy.

What, in your mind, drives agitation for minimum wage increases if market wage increases are already maintaining workers' ability to get necessities and some luxuries?

Just a way for politicians to look like they're doing something without rocking the boat too much?

[sadoeconomist]

Well, we were talking about the federal minimum wage, so that’s the relevant number. I was just trying to say, people tend to wildly overestimate the current economic impact of the federal minimum wage, it’s so low that it has almost no effect on real-world economic activity. A $15 minimum would actually do something, though, so it’s not just about appearances, they’re actually trying to accomplish something with it.

Unions are the main force behind the push for a higher minimum wage - that’s obvious to anyone, right? But think about it - union members pretty much universally make well above not just the current minimum wage but also their proposed $15 minimum, they won’t be directly affected by it. So why do unions put so much effort into demanding a higher minimum wage? Are they really altruistically advocating to increase the wages of ‘scabs’ out of the goodness of their hearts?

The truth is, destroying the jobs of low-wage non-union workers to protect relatively higher-paid union workers from competition is and has always been the point of the minimum wage. The main advocates of raising the minimum wage are actually trying to punch down at the poorest workers in the country. When the minimum wage was instituted this very much had a racial component to it because unions excluded nonwhites and immigrants and the minimum wage was justified as preventing such people from ‘under-living’ white workers and polluting the gene pool by breeding unchecked. Somehow the rhetoric justifying the policy reversed its polarity with the times while the fundamental policy remained exactly the same - which is kind of a running theme with long-lived federal policies.

And a significant portion of the wage premium commanded by union workers is taken in the form of union dues, and a significant portion of those union dues are sent to the Democratic Party. So those politicians ultimately are profiting from increasing the minimum wage. They’re talking about throwing millions more low-wage workers out of work when millions are already out of work due to the lockdown and they’d personally profit from it.

Large corporations, as well, generally already pay all or most of their employees over $15 an hour (it’s become fashionable for the biggest and evilest corporations like Amazon to publicize company-wide minimum wages, you may have noticed), or dodge the issue by calling them independent contractors in the case of things like Uber, etc. while the smaller businesses they compete with tend to pay less. If you’re not going to be affected by a minimum wage increase, but it destroys your competitors, then obviously you’ll be for it.

As an economist I criticize price controls in general and the minimum wage is just one example of a price floor. And a union is a type of cartel, which seeks to impede the operation of markets in a similar way. These things are economically damaging no matter what kind of industry they’re found in, and messing with the price system and keeping markets from clearing using the power of the state is especially stupid and dangerous.

[sadoeconomist]

So when Earth gets its own permanent superstorm like Jupiter’s Great Red Spot and it makes it so the tropics are basically no longer habitable by humans is it going to have one of these random old-person hurricane names

How fucked up would it be if they chose your first name for that storm

Like you’d pretty much have to change it, right? The storm’s not going away and keeping your name would be in pretty poor taste, I’d think

[sadoeconomist]

Since this keeps getting notes every day even though it's been ages since I've posted here I feel like I should mention that the original post was in fact inspired by a 1994 science fiction novel by John Barnes named 'Mother of Storms.' It's been probably 20 years since I read it though, so I don't remember what they actually named the storm in the book.

[nerdtracks]

Visit Original Link

[gravegospel]

TUMBLING DOWN TUMBLING DOWN TUMBLING DOWN

[sadoeconomist]

Opinion on iPads?

1. Fuck Apple, I’m never using an Apple product again

2. If you already have a phone and a PC, there are only a handful of additional things a tablet actually lets you do, they’re surprisingly useless, especially with the way tablet makers have their software so locked down

3. They’re incredibly overpriced for how little they can do, they’re almost as bad as smartwatches in terms of being trendy but useless conspicuous consumption pieces

[we-love-gaming]

what more do you need??

[m-hammy]

[executiveoutcomes-deactivated20]

women mad that a dude can just sit 

[sadoeconomist]

The is the opposite of that ‘Damn bitch, you live like this?’ comic

[sadoeconomist]

I was just looking at some of the posts from the first couple of years of my blog and it’s like, about 2/3rds of the actual porn there is flagged but about 1/3rd of the non-porn is also flagged...the filter works somewhat better than flipping a coin but it still has an enormous rate of both false positives and false negatives

There was one case where there was a flagged post with a perfectly sfw picture of a non-nude cosplayer right above an unflagged post with a gifset of a woman spread-eagle on her bed masturbating with a Hitachi Magic Wand, pretty funny stuff

Also it seems like the filter isn’t very good at recognizing naked people when they’re all tied up with rope, maybe the BDSM community here won’t be as affected by the purge as I thought

[bunnie-blogging]

it was an honor being horny with you all

[sadoeconomist]

I’m actually not sure if I’m going to survive the purge or not

I’ve been flagged as NSFW and all that since I started this blog six years ago and the first couple of years are full of porn but I haven’t posted or reblogged any porn images or videos in ages

The site is already clearly much less populated than it used to be, though - I should probably be looking for a new blogging site anyway

I’ll be in anarchyinblack’s Discord whatever happens if anyone needs me

[perspectivemax-deactivated20181]

https://youtu.be/Vgfi1QZILxk

The secret life of Timothy mcveigh

[sadoeconomist]

I watched this a few days ago, it’s pretty conclusive when you put it all together

I’d be curious to see any sort of rebuttal to this from anyone who believes the OKC bombing wasn’t a false flag

I only started watching the Corbett Report when the WW1 Conspiracy videos came out, I highly recommend those btw, but I’m not sure how credible Corbett is yet - I’ve watched a lot of his videos over the past couple of weeks on topics I’ve independently researched and I know a lot about and I haven’t seen him really be flat-out wrong yet, it’s pretty alarming

[sadoeconomist]

voxette-vk said: Is it otherwise good?

I think the new features are very much a step in the right direction but it broke a lot of things in the game, in particular it seems the AI has no idea how to deal with the new production mechanics

It’s weird, the one thing I really like in Stellaris is the species/empire creation system and that’s the one thing none of the other Paradox games have, and meanwhile all the things that other Paradox games have done incredibly well, Stellaris has absolutely basic placeholder versions of

Like CK2 has complex characters that are always involved in crazy Shakespearean drama with each other - Stellaris’s sector governors and faction leaders and stuff could be like that but they’re just a name, age, xp bar, and a couple of bonuses

The trade system in EU4 is fun because you actually compete against other empires’ merchants to steer and collect trade, and Stellaris actually adopted a bunch of aspects of EU4′s trade system in this last update - except for the competitive part that actually makes it fun and interesting

They’ve also taken very encouraging steps toward making the production system a little closer to the complex tiered system in the Victoria games - now you have to consume minerals to produce consumer goods which get consumed by researchers and a bunch of other jobs, and minerals also get turned into alloys which go to building ships and stations, etc. but while Vicky has like 40 different commodities and producing them and getting access to them in your sphere of influence is a big part of the game that drives international relations and competition, Stellaris only has a few and basically everybody can produce them domestically

And the other Paradox game to compare to is Hearts of Iron which mostly focuses on a detailed simulation of ground combat which is clearly still a placeholder system in Stellaris

This is the second massive rework of the game since it launched - I think they’re generally solving old problems faster than they’re creating new ones? But it’s hard to say

They’re following the same kind of model as HoI4 I guess - launch with a bunch of poorly thought out placeholder systems, sell DLC fixing each of them one by one, each DLC contains gamebreaking bugs and balance problems that take months to fix...it’s a painful process but they are gradually improving

[sadoeconomist]

In my first Stellaris game of the new patch I decided to try out a xenophobic fanatic pacifist empire with Inward Perfection, to try to avoid wars so I could mess around and learn the new production mechanics

I have three neighbors, one of them is a tiny xenophile fanatic pacifist democracy who loves me, and the other two are devouring swarms. One of the swarms is bordered on the other side by a federation that has repeatedly kicked its ass and the other swarm is bordered by a fanatic militarist empire that has repeatedly kicked its ass. So my neighbors are all super weak and too afraid of me to attack me, but I can’t initiate any wars or have much in the way of diplomatic relations at all due to the Inward Perfection civic

It’s been decades ingame and hours of real time since I finished expanding to every unoccupied system I could reach and NOTHING is happening, I’ve just been clicking to build factories and research stuff with no actual conflict or problems I need to deal with

I wanted to actually finish a game of Stellaris for once but I think I’m going to restart as a devouring swarm myself so at least I’ll always have something to do

[sadoeconomist]

With discourse about the thot-audit going around, how long until "That said, people who voluntarily collaborate with the IRS should be hanged from lampposts" becomes the next "Carthago Delenda Est"?

Honestly the whole thot audit thing is just wasting the IRS’s time - most girls selling their private Snapchat accounts or whatever don’t make enough to have to report it, and every actual pro sex worker I’ve talked to about it (mostly pro dommes, to be fair) does, to my great dismay, pay taxes on their income from sex work

I’d enjoy seeing ‘taxation is just a way for toxic alt-right trolls to harass women and minorities’ become a meme though - imagine if the IRS became as hated on the left as ICE

Though that’d probably just get all the Republicans to line up to support the IRS, sadly

Also, I just want to say I’m absolutely shocked I haven’t seen any pictures of Irwin R. Schyster from the WWF since this bullshit started