yupitsme123

I don't know much about Peterson beyond clips that pop in my feeds, but he appears to be someone who's familiar with world history and the history of thought, and that applies some kind of intellectual rigor in making those ideas relevant to the issues of today, all while making it accessible for the general public. There aren't too many intellectuals doing that right now. He aligns pretty well with my concept of what Humanities is supposed to be.

Meanwhile I routinely hear Humanities students run their mouths about Marxism without even knowing who Hegel is. Or ranting about slavery while thinking that the Arab Slave Trade and the British Anti-Slavery campaign are just revisionist ideas. I ask myself all the time, what exactly do Humanities students get taught these days? Do they learn anything from before the days of Critical Theory?

It shouldn't be a surprise that there's no more trust. And blaming it on one "side" makes no sense because in Chomsky's view power has only one side, not two.

Chomsky and other critical theorists and marxists pointed out that those in power get to dictate what's truth, what's news, what values we should follow. Once you realize that, the next step was supposed to be revolution followed by a world with no power structure.

The various revolutions of the 20th century never worked out that way, and nobody wants to risk their life for that stuff anymore. Meanwhile I think we've all assimilated Chomsky's view that the system is rigged and that everything is a lie or a distortion invented to perpetuate the power structure.

There's no more trust because there's nobody to trust in. You either keep your head down and just try to exist, or you lie to yourself and pick out which lies you want to buy into.

This ties in with the Art Nouveau movement which he was a part of. If you look at paintings and other architecture from the time period, there are lots of references to nature and "organic" shapes.

It's interesting to me that a country that loves consumerism so much doesn't have a pro-consumer movement.

It looks like Ralph Nader led one for a while back in the '70s but it's long dead now.

If someone were to revive such a movement or if some politicians were to attach themselves to it then I think it would be hugely popular.

During the days of slavery, the Dems were the party pushing to maintain the status quo and the existing power structure. The Republicans were those fighting to change it.

Coming out of the civil rights movement, it was the democrats who wanted to change the status quo and the Republicans who wanted to defend it.

In the present period of endless culture war and polticization of everything, it seems that the democrats are the ones on the side of the status quo and existing power structures. They want to shove everyone into identity groups, put those groups into hierarchies, they want to shame certain groups and grant new privileges to others.

A lot of people are exhausted by the culture war, tired of having every aspect of our lives coopted to remind us to feel bad about ourselves and to hate each other. I don't think Trump is really offering a new path here yet, but he's recognizing what people say all the time in private and which the democrats refuse to accept.

Sounds like you want a super liquid asset that's not actually an asset because it doesn't appreciate, and also it needs to be really easy to buy, cheaply. That's unlikely to happen and what we have right now is probably as close as one can get to that.

I wasn't saying that coops or TICs are ideal, just that they show what happens when you remove the speculative and investment aspect as well as the subsidy of below-market interest rates and mortgages that any idiot can qualify for. The result is prices which are lower by 10-20%.

People seem to want an engineered, top-down, state provided solution that makes homeownership more affordable. But we've already tried many of those solutions and they just inflate prices and encourage speculation and securitization.

A better approach might be to end the various implicit and explicit subsidies on mortgages and homeownership, keep speculators, investors, and big developers out of the market, and focus on owner occupied dwellings. I think this would disinflate the housing market and allow it to get back to where it should be.

I think San Francisco has something like this with their Below Market Rate (BMR) housing program. You have to be below a certain income to be considered, and basically you get to pay a fixed monthly rate to "own" a place that can only be sold for a fixed amount. It always just sounded like rent to me.

I think that NYC's co-ops (TICs in San Francisco) provided an interesting alternative model. They usually require owner-occupancy, can't be rented easily, and are difficult to finance.

These restrictions eliminate investors and speculators, and shields the the units from the inflation that happens from fed intervention and super low rates.

The result is that they're usually priced a lot lower and appreciate more slowly than they would be if they were condos.

I think a big component of China's imperialist strategy is to de-infustrialize the world, much like what's happened to the US.

I'm pretty sure most of the robots and drones are manufacturered in China though. Even if they weren't, a lot of critical components for building things come from there now.

In the past, people were able to buy a small piece of land and develop it themselves. Literally build the house themselves. Over a long period time if necessary to spread out the cost. They also built 2-4 family homes so they could bring in some rent or house a family member.

None of this is really allowed anymore and it's very hard to find a piece of land to do it with. Enabling this sort of construction and forcing or incentiving small plots of land might open up options for people on the lower end.

Latin America is probably the region to look at since it's more developed than Africa but less so than the US and Europe, and has developed dramatically in recent decades. One or two generations ago people still had massive families, but now their rates are falling and in my experience educated, independent women are not particularly interested in having families, or only in having small ones.

Existing big-city police forces already have the resources to stop crime in their respective cities. They just choose not to do it. If you want to see how capable they are of stopping crimes that are of interest to them, try setting up an illegal food stand or parking without paying the meter. You'll be busted within hours.

They have budgets in the Billions of dollars, tons of surveillance equipment, military grade weapons, and a monopoly on force. But they still can't deal with street thugs, belligerent crazy people, or jerks on the subway like cities in other countries manage to do?

I don't know what Trump's game is in all of this, but we should stop pretending that blue cities aren't already playing their own games and they clearly don't involve stopping or solving crime.

I have a question on the topic of 1600s history.

Do historians see this as a period of global stagnation or isolation or anything like that? It seems like most of the world's major powers were either stagnating or declining. Spain, Portugal, Venice, the Ottomans, Ming China. Meanwhile Germany was getting ripped apart in the 30 Years War, England in a Civil War, and Japan closed itself off. The Dutch were doing okay I guess.

Then towards the end of the century we see all sorts of new powers emerge.

Am I imagining this?

Strangely, there's a ton of vacant commercial real estate in my neighborhood that the corporate landlords don't seem to be in any rush to rent out.

I agree with everything that you said but it's a "better the devil you know" type of situation.

The vibe that many people have in the US is that things are constantly in flux and that we have less and less control over our lives and environments. Anything could happen.

Considering that, I could understand wanting to go somewhere where there's a known quantity of danger and a known set of rules for avoiding it.