2026-07-12 19:51:33 <oak         > Morning o/
2026-07-12 20:03:46 <lofty       > morning
2026-07-12 20:05:52 <oak         > Hey lofty
2026-07-12 20:06:08 <lofty       > hi oak
2026-07-12 20:07:01 <oak         > How are you doing? Are you hacking on anything lately?
2026-07-12 20:08:13 <lofty       > the various european heatwaves have made hacking on things a bit of a challenge. even my non-forth chess program has had a development hiatus
2026-07-12 20:53:21 <tabemann    > why? to hot to think? or is your hardware overheating? (so how are you in IRC?)
2026-07-12 20:53:56 <lofty       > too hot to think; I've spent most of the past few days collapsed on the sofa with a fan
2026-07-12 21:00:53 <oak         > I know those kinds of days. :'(
2026-07-12 21:08:49 <tabemann    > and europe does not have AC -- apparently certain people in France at least think AC is a "maladaptive response to global warming" and thus deprecate it even though more people die each summer of heat in europe than people die of gunshot wounds here in the US
2026-07-12 21:11:26 <lofty       > a few degrees here or there doesn't matter for a computer, but it matters a lot to the computer's owner...
2026-07-12 21:13:14 <tabemann    > and of course, you get problems with 'historical' buildings and rules requiring getting approval from other residents which allow stupid boomers who complain about noise which get in the way of installing AC
2026-07-12 21:14:04 <lofty       > I actually live in a newbuild, but the building regulations were written for cold winters not blazing summers...
2026-07-12 21:14:57 <lofty       > (how well-insulated is this building? I had the windows open during winter.)
2026-07-12 21:15:37 <tabemann    > I remember a decade ago people were already dying of heat en masse each summer
2026-07-12 21:16:29 <tabemann    > this house was built in the 19th century and has AC (of course AC wasn't installed when it was built, but if they installed AC along the way I'm surprised they didn't built it in new construction over where you are)
2026-07-12 21:17:07 <lofty       > (sure, the average resident does not have a computing cluster in their room, but I don't imagine I would have been cold without it)
2026-07-12 21:17:47 <tabemann    > you're running a *cluster* in your house? no wonder you're hot
2026-07-12 21:18:16 <lofty       > I had it switched off during the heatwave, naturally :p
2026-07-12 21:19:55 <lofty       > on the one hand there are definitely more energy-efficient machines to use than the ones I have, but those would be out of my budget, so, eh
2026-07-12 21:20:13 <tabemann    > I myself live in Wisconsin where it both gets *cold* in the winter (almost certainly colder than you unless you live somewhere in scandinavia), yet I still have AC
2026-07-12 21:20:40 <lofty       > (🇬🇧)
2026-07-12 21:21:01 <tabemann    > what did you just type?
2026-07-12 21:22:10 <lofty       > unicode flag for the UK
2026-07-12 21:22:46 <tabemann    > okay, certainly colder temperature-wise in the winter here, but you get damper winters than we do
2026-07-12 21:23:02 <lofty       > damper everything, really.
2026-07-12 21:23:22 <tabemann    > Wisconsin is dry, cold winters and damp, hot summers
2026-07-12 21:23:58 <lofty       > I did enjoy waking up at one point to my thermometer reading 8.6C 93%
2026-07-12 21:24:32 <tabemann    > 93% humidity at 8.6 C?
2026-07-12 21:24:37 <lofty       > yes.
2026-07-12 21:24:51 <lofty       > that was in a different building :p
2026-07-12 21:25:04 <tabemann    > in the winter here my hands inevitably crack up really badly because the air is so dry
2026-07-12 21:25:39 <tabemann    > 47 F isn't bad by winter standards here though
2026-07-12 21:25:52 <lofty       > this was indoor temperature, if it wasn't clear.
2026-07-12 21:26:08 <tabemann    > wait, did you not have heating?
2026-07-12 21:26:44 <tabemann    > or had you left your windows open?
2026-07-12 21:27:09 <lofty       > my roommate had generational trauma over fuel poverty.
2026-07-12 21:28:08 <lofty       > "housemate", is I guess the better word
2026-07-12 21:28:22 <tabemann    > they insisted on keeping the heat off in the winter?
2026-07-12 21:28:24 <lofty       > but they were quite insistent on leaving the central heating off to save money
2026-07-12 21:28:27 <tabemann    > no one does that here
2026-07-12 21:28:59 <tabemann    > leaving your heat off in the winter here is a very good way to have your pipes explode
2026-07-12 21:30:03 <tabemann    > I remember at my current workplace a few years ago they had a disaster where a big pipe exploded over christmas break, presumably because someone left a door open
2026-07-12 21:30:24 <lofty       > (my understanding is that American heating systems typically use air, while British heating systems typically use water. one reason why air conditioning is uncommon here.)
2026-07-12 21:30:51 <tabemann    > yes, but they also make window AC units
2026-07-12 21:31:10 <lofty       > our windows pivot, they don't slide.
2026-07-12 21:31:44 <tabemann    > for instance, my old house used radiators, but when I passed it recently someone'd stuck in a window AC unit
2026-07-12 21:31:48 <lofty       > you can't really install a window air con unit because the window and the hinge get in the way.
2026-07-12 21:33:26 <tabemann    > that seems really odd in new construction
2026-07-12 21:34:27 <lofty       > it's to make it harder for kids to fall out
2026-07-12 21:34:50 <tabemann    > I've never encountered a window here that was easy to open
2026-07-12 21:35:13 <tabemann    > every window I've encountered that slides open was a PITA to open
2026-07-12 21:36:25 <tabemann    > also, windows here typically have removable screens, so to fall out you'd have to remove the screen before launching yourself out
2026-07-12 21:36:43 <lofty       > either way, it means that window air conditioning units are not really a thing here.
2026-07-12 21:36:47 <tabemann    > (so you can open the window without mosquitos and flies getting in)
2026-07-12 21:38:05 <tabemann    > I'm still surprised that a new house would be built without AC, especially with how you europeans drop like flies every summer
2026-07-12 21:38:06 <lofty       > yeah, we don't have such things because mosquitoes in the UK are more nuisance than dangerous
2026-07-12 21:38:29 <tabemann    > window screens are why malaria died out in the US
2026-07-12 21:39:23 <tabemann    > and we still have things like various mosquito-borne encephalitis viruses such as west nile (which we got from somewhere in eurafrica, incidentally)
2026-07-12 21:40:03 <tabemann    > (but those have hosts other than humans, which is why they haven't died out)
2026-07-12 21:40:54 <tabemann    > (yes, there was malaria in the US up to the 1950's)
2026-07-12 22:10:15 <xentrac     > Wisconsin gets both awfully cold in the winter and awfully hot in the summer
2026-07-12 22:11:19 <tabemann    > yes
2026-07-12 22:11:45 <xentrac     > there are a lot of radiator-based heating systems in the US, too.  and a few in Argentina
2026-07-12 22:11:59 <tabemann    > this house used to be radiator-based
2026-07-12 22:12:47 <tabemann    > you can still see the holes where the radiators used to be connected from that the grain of the wood where the holes were doesn't match
2026-07-12 22:22:01 <tabemann    > but yeah, if europeans can (rightly) criticize americans on their attitude towards guns, americans can (rightly) criticize europeans on their attitude towards air conditioning
2026-07-12 22:23:28 <tabemann    > you guys are suffering and dying en masse completely unnecessarily
2026-07-12 22:26:02 <tabemann    > and while some say "but AC uses electricity!" there is an obvious, and green solution -- solar power! -- which coincidentally generates the most power at precisely the same time as when AC is most needed
2026-07-12 22:33:10 <tabemann    > and yeah, here in Wisconsin it is actually illegal for the power company to turn off your power in the winter -- even if you don't pay them a cent
2026-07-12 22:33:20 <tabemann    > heat is so important here
2026-07-12 22:38:08 <xentrac     >     yeah
2026-07-12 22:38:10 <xentrac     > oops
2026-07-12 22:38:19 <xentrac     > I just meant "yeah"
2026-07-12 22:38:25 <xentrac     > unindented!
2026-07-12 22:39:14 <xentrac     > historically there are a lot of instances of states disarming some or all of their populations
2026-07-12 22:39:47 <xentrac     > a lot of those have worked out pretty poorly for the populations
2026-07-12 22:40:28 <tabemann    > depends -- look at australia before and after they introduced gun laws
2026-07-12 22:40:41 <xentrac     > it hasn't been very long
2026-07-12 22:41:02 <xentrac     > maybe historical precedents are inapplicable under modern conditions
2026-07-12 22:41:04 <tabemann    > that was in the 1990's, I think it's been about 30 years
2026-07-12 22:41:20 <xentrac     > an eyeblink
2026-07-12 22:42:43 <tabemann    > the thing is that the guns americans are allowed to own aren't very useful in, say, a civil war, and the whole argument that gun rights protect the rights of the population against the government essentially assumes being able to wage a civil war against the state
2026-07-12 22:43:05 <xentrac     > almost all gun violence is perpetrated by states or armed insurgencies
2026-07-12 22:43:33 <xentrac     > they seemed to be pretty effective against the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan
2026-07-12 22:43:41 <tabemann    > here in the US the vast majority of gun violence is perpetrated by private citizens
2026-07-12 22:43:49 <xentrac     > no, that isn't true
2026-07-12 22:44:00 <tabemann    > people in the US aren't armed with AK-47's
2026-07-12 22:44:12 <tabemann    > or IED's
2026-07-12 22:44:15 <xentrac     > no, they use AR-15s instead
2026-07-12 22:44:29 <tabemann    > yes, against kids in schools
2026-07-12 22:44:39 <xentrac     > they routinely build IEDs for fun in events like Boomershoot
2026-07-12 22:45:01 <xentrac     > mostly they use AR-15s against whatever country they've decided to invade this year
2026-07-12 22:45:46 <xentrac     > statistically speaking though the US peacetime homicide rate is pretty insignificant
2026-07-12 22:46:07 <xentrac     > maybe 7 murders per 100k people per year
2026-07-12 22:46:13 <tabemann    > the difference between an AK-47 and an AR-15 is that an AK-47 is a fully automatic weapon loaded with large-caliber rifle bullets while an AR-15 is a semiautomatic weapon loaded with small-caliber rifle bullets
2026-07-12 22:46:57 <tabemann    > (by AK-47 I am lumping in successors like the AKM but *not* the AK-74, which is a Soviet M-16 clone)
2026-07-12 22:46:57 <xentrac     > either an AK-47 or an AR-15 canbe automatic or semiautomatic, and they use similar but not identical calibers
2026-07-12 22:47:27 <xentrac     > and the semi/full automatic conversion is not very difficult
2026-07-12 22:47:38 <xentrac     > but let's do the multiplication of murders
2026-07-12 22:48:03 <xentrac     > it's been 80 years since WWII, over which time the US population averaged about 200 million
2026-07-12 22:49:18 <xentrac     > if we round off the peacetime murder rate to 10 per 100k per year, we get 1.6 million murders, some of which involved guns
2026-07-12 22:50:57 <tabemann    > in 2024 roughly 76% of murders in the US were committed with guns
2026-07-12 22:51:11 <xentrac     > by contrast, in just the Vietnam War, the US armed forces and their South Vietnamese allies killed 4.4 million people
2026-07-12 22:51:39 <xentrac     > sorry, killed and wounded
2026-07-12 22:52:40 <xentrac     > somewhere between 400k and 2 million Vietnamese civilians were killed
2026-07-12 22:53:22 <tabemann    > to me at least the only point to even allowing Americans to own guns is if they are permitted to own actual military weapons and organize themselves into militias, or otherwise the whole "guns allow us to protect ourselves from the government" is a juke
2026-07-12 22:53:24 <tabemann    > *joke
2026-07-12 22:54:09 <xentrac     > well, there are a lot of kinds of government violence that fall far short of an actual civil war
2026-07-12 22:54:50 <xentrac     > consider the current ethnic cleansing campaign Trump is carrying out
2026-07-12 22:56:23 <xentrac     > but also, as I said, the US lost in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and ultimately even in Iraq, even though the forces they were facing there were armed with just the Soviet equivalent of AR-15s
2026-07-12 22:56:32 <tabemann    > and in how many cases has americans being in theory able to shoot trump's thugs actually resulted in real resistance to the regime?
2026-07-12 22:57:49 <tabemann    > these guns that private citizens own are being used to shoot other private citizens, not being used in armed resistance against oppression, anyways
2026-07-12 22:58:25 <xentrac     > those shootings are a rounding error, though
2026-07-12 22:59:06 <tabemann    > they far outstrip shootings in the rest of the developed world though
2026-07-12 22:59:16 <xentrac     > not if you include WWII
2026-07-12 22:59:30 <xentrac     > all the private murders in the US since WWII haven't come close to even the deaths they inflicted in Vietnam, much less the deaths in WWII
2026-07-12 23:00:34 <xentrac     > if you want to be safer from getting shot, you shouldn't focus on reducing the risk of private murders. how many people do you personally know in Wisconsin who have been murdered?  Maybe one?  Zero?
2026-07-12 23:01:18 <tabemann    > they have maps of shootings each year in Milwaukee
2026-07-12 23:01:22 <xentrac     > you should focus on reducing the risk of things like thhe Holodomor, the Holocaust, the Great Leap Forward, the Vietnam War, etc.
2026-07-12 23:01:45 <xentrac     > Because you're much more likely to be killed by one of those.
2026-07-12 23:02:41 <tabemann    > the only thing that approaches that here in the US since WW2 (before WW2 you did have lynching) is what trump is doing now, and trump thug's have murdered a handful of people?
2026-07-12 23:03:14 <xentrac     > Maybe private gun ownership makes such catastrophes *more* likely, or maybe it makes them less likely, but either way the chance you'll get capped by the Crips or MS-13 is a rounding error
2026-07-12 23:03:52 <tabemann    > *thugs
2026-07-12 23:03:53 <xentrac     > yes, big democides are necessarily rather rare events, which makes the risk of them hardeer to rationally assess
2026-07-12 23:04:32 <xentrac     > Trump is probably not going to be able to put millions of people in death camps, as much as he'd like to
2026-07-12 23:04:39 <xentrac     > his successor might
2026-07-12 23:05:51 <tabemann    > of course, the best way to avoid that at this point is to defeat trump, and to put as many of the people in his regime (even if the supreme court has given him personally immunity) in prison to make an example of them
2026-07-12 23:06:01 <tabemann    > mass arrests and trials of ICE members and like
2026-07-12 23:07:13 <tabemann    > of course, that requires the democrats to have the balls to start arresting everyone possible tied to trump as fast as possible
2026-07-12 23:07:35 <tabemann    > (something they might not have, knowing them)
2026-07-12 23:08:12 <xentrac     > I am skeptical that the answer to "how do we reduce the systematic risk of any conflict spiraling out of control into mass deaths" looks anything like "this faction ought to be victorious in this particular battle and enact harsh reprisals against their opponents"
2026-07-12 23:09:35 <tabemann    > that's like saying that we shouldn't've had the nuremberg trial and like because that wasn't nice to the nazis
2026-07-12 23:09:35 <xentrac     > I think plausible answers might look like democratic institutions, economic opportunity, disarming the civilian population, arming the civilian population, religious movements, etc.
2026-07-12 23:10:09 <xentrac     > the nuremberg trials didn't win the war
2026-07-12 23:10:36 <tabemann    > no they didn't, but they got out of the way many of the people who would have wanted to resurrect the Reich
2026-07-12 23:11:16 <tabemann    > of course, that isn't *enough*
2026-07-12 23:11:32 <tabemann    > restructuring the government to keep this sort of thing from happening again is necessary
2026-07-12 23:12:10 <xentrac     > you'll note that there were no Nuremberg trials for US war criminals like Curtis LeMay, and yet the number of civilians they were allowed to firebomb in the following years fell dramatically
2026-07-12 23:12:58 <xentrac     > not to zero, as I noted with the Vietnam war, but to a fraction of what they had been
2026-07-12 23:13:53 <tabemann    > I should note that more tons of explosives were dropped in Vietnam than in all of WW2
2026-07-12 23:14:10 <xentrac     > the occupying powers went considerably further than just holding some trials to de-Nazify the German government
2026-07-12 23:14:15 <tabemann    > there wasn't firebombing per se though
2026-07-12 23:14:40 <xentrac     > many fewer deaths resulted
2026-07-12 23:14:56 <tabemann    > of course, that's why restructuring the government and systematically dismantling the ability of the would-then-be-former regime's partisans to repeat things is necessary
2026-07-12 23:15:00 <xentrac     > most deaths in WWII weren't from bombing
2026-07-12 23:16:01 <tabemann    > there were massacres and mass executions by both sides in Vietnam, but not on the same scale, and there were no gas chambers
2026-07-12 23:17:14 <xentrac     > there were gas-chamber-like killing fields over the border in Kampuchea, but you can't directly pin that on bloodthirsty American war criminals who came out of WWII
2026-07-12 23:17:32 <tabemann    > yes
2026-07-12 23:18:20 <xentrac     > but how do you build institutions, and the democratic ones have g good track record here, to prevent that kind of thing from happening in the US?
2026-07-12 23:18:24 <tabemann    > and in that case the Khmer Rouge did kill about one fourth of the population of Cambodia in under five years
2026-07-12 23:19:03 <xentrac     > what kind of on-the-ground conditions would favor de-escalation of communal or political violence?
2026-07-12 23:19:05 <tabemann    > xentrac: the big problem is that major constitutional changes are needed, which may be impossible, e.g. introducing a voting system like that in Australia or (ironically enough) Northern Ireland
2026-07-12 23:19:49 <xentrac     > lots of countries have avoided death camps without proportional representation, so I am skeptical of this answer
2026-07-12 23:20:33 <xentrac     > the US had a big constitutional change a few weeks ago, but to me it seems to be in the wrong direction
2026-07-12 23:21:05 <tabemann    > the key thing is to deliberately cause the breakdown of the two-party system into a multi-party system in which no party can hold onto power without making coalitions
2026-07-12 23:21:40 <tabemann    > the thing is, the democrats themselves would never intentionally cause this
2026-07-12 23:21:40 <xentrac     > June 29: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._Slaughter
2026-07-12 23:21:48 <tabemann    > yeah
2026-07-12 23:22:22 <xentrac     > yes, any such breakdown is likely to provoke precisely the kind of mass slaughter I would prefer to prevent
2026-07-12 23:23:06 <xentrac     > since the government is composed entirely of people who get their power from one or the oher of the two parties whose influence would be curtailed
2026-07-12 23:23:50 <xentrac     > *othher
2026-07-12 23:23:58 <xentrac     > ugh, I can't type
2026-07-12 23:24:01 <tabemann    > clearly the two-party system here in the US has shown itself to be a failure
2026-07-12 23:24:29 <xentrac     > really?  I think it's been the most spectacular success in human history
2026-07-12 23:25:16 <veltas      > This is an interesting point xentrac re war being more deadly, I've not heard that before
2026-07-12 23:25:18 <tabemann    > as you have one party which is an uneasy coalition between left-liberals and right-centrists and another party which is essentially a fascist party that a lot of people vote for because it is "their tribe"
2026-07-12 23:25:33 <veltas      > I guess I'm a heat apologist because I've got no AC and I've just been dealing with it
2026-07-12 23:25:53 <veltas      > I think Terry would laugh at this given the heat he's gone through in the bush
2026-07-12 23:26:10 <xentrac     > it's been 160 years since the last civil war, during which time the country it governed went from a bit of a provincial backwater to by far the richest and most powerful country in the world, spreading its ideas of democracy and human rights to almost half the world
2026-07-12 23:26:29 <xentrac     > if that's failure, what would success look like?
2026-07-12 23:27:01 <xentrac     > veltas: don't forget democides!  the Great Leap Forward was deadlier than any war in history
2026-07-12 23:27:16 <veltas      > I don't forget
2026-07-12 23:27:37 <tabemann    > in my lifetime the country has been steadily dragged rightward, being only paused (but not reversed) by periods in which the democrats actually controlled congress and the presidency
2026-07-12 23:27:49 <xentrac     > and the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, the Holodomor, and the Killing Fields deserve at least honorable mentions
2026-07-12 23:28:35 <tabemann    > 
ACTION was born while Reagan was president

2026-07-12 23:28:44 <xentrac     > but none of those are comparable to the low-level terrorist campaigns the US has experienced like the Jim-Crow-era lynchings or the Symbionese Liberation Army
2026-07-12 23:29:37 <xentrac     > tabemann: and yet the civil murder rate has remaioned in rounding-error territory.  why is that?
2026-07-12 23:30:37 <xentrac     > veltas: in the bush there's less humidity
2026-07-12 23:30:54 <veltas      > Yeah but the temperatures Terry experienced were mental
2026-07-12 23:30:58 <xentrac     > yeah
2026-07-12 23:31:07 <tabemann    > xentrac: yet it far outstrips the civil murder rate in the rest of the developed world since WW2 when one excludes cases like the yugoslav wars and the algerian war
2026-07-12 23:31:28 <tabemann    > (and whether the yugoslav wars even count as "developed world" is a good question)
2026-07-12 23:32:06 <xentrac     > tabemann: yes, but none of those rates are high enough to make a dent.  they're entertainment-value murder rates, good only for the nightly news
2026-07-12 23:32:29 <xentrac     > I asked before how many people you knew had been murdered.  in your entire life.  on?
2026-07-12 23:32:33 <xentrac     > *one?
2026-07-12 23:33:00 <tabemann    > I've known one person who killed themselves by jumping off a bridge, that's it
2026-07-12 23:33:28 <xentrac     > that's suicide, not murder; I've known lots of people who did that
2026-07-12 23:33:40 <xentrac     > although, perhaps surprisingly, none with guns
2026-07-12 23:34:04 <lofty       > Um, at what point is this discussion considered off-topic? Asking for reference
2026-07-12 23:34:19 <xentrac     > about ten thousand words ago :)
2026-07-12 23:34:42 <xentrac     > My great-uncle self-published a book called "Pioneer Pride", an anthology of anecdotes from where he lived in Eastern New Mexico
2026-07-12 23:35:15 <xentrac     > he moved there at almost the end of the Homestead Act
2026-07-12 23:35:44 <xentrac     > I think he knew about a dozen people who'd been murdered there
2026-07-12 23:36:04 <xentrac     > much more violent than peacetime city life
2026-07-12 23:36:55 <xentrac     > but on the other hand there's my Jewish ex-girlfriend.  she's 53 now, and her parents were the only two survivors of their respective families
2026-07-12 23:37:10 <xentrac     > all the others were killed in the Holocaust
2026-07-12 23:37:23 <tabemann    > oh, actually, there were people in my family who were murdered -- by ukrainian nazi collaborators
2026-07-12 23:37:24 <xentrac     > that's not a difference in degree but a difference in kind
2026-07-12 23:37:33 <xentrac     > did you know them?
2026-07-12 23:37:36 <tabemann    > I never knew them myself, obviously
2026-07-12 23:38:02 <xentrac     > they could have been murdered in the 80s or 90s due to old grudges or something
2026-07-12 23:38:35 <tabemann    > they were killed during WW2 -- their whole village was razed and everyone in it was murdered
2026-07-12 23:38:39 <xentrac     > yeah
2026-07-12 23:39:19 <xentrac     > so, that's the kind of thing we should be basing our weapons policy on: how to reduce the risk of villages being razed
2026-07-12 23:39:43 <tabemann    > they were ethnic poles, not jews, killed because the nazis thought the people in their village were too friendly towards the soviets
2026-07-12 23:39:44 <xentrac     > Switzerland here seems like maybe a more promising model than the Warsaw Ghetto
2026-07-12 23:39:57 <xentrac     > right, there was a lot of that
2026-07-12 23:40:08 <veltas      > lofty: Off-topic is permitted in here, but at discretion of the operators
2026-07-12 23:41:03 <tabemann    > xentrac: the only problem with switzerland is that it's had things like where the federal gov't had to force a canton to grant women's suffrage -- in the 1970's
2026-07-12 23:41:31 <veltas      > There's a background to that though, the soviets were genociding groups before WW2
2026-07-12 23:41:35 <veltas      > Not that two wrongs make a right...
2026-07-12 23:42:09 <xentrac     > I don't care about suffrage except as a means to the end of resolving conflicts through voting rather than mass killing
2026-07-12 23:42:51 <veltas      > It's certainly a good benchmark
2026-07-12 23:43:11 <xentrac     > democracy is a terrible system.  why should people like Trump be in a position to tell people like Terence Tao what to do?  that's perverted
2026-07-12 23:43:27 <xentrac     > but it's a damn sight better than mass murder
2026-07-12 23:43:42 <tabemann    > what I mean is that in some case direct democracy without an emphasis on rights being more important than direct democracy alone can have illiberal results (and I saw this as a former anarchist and present-day libertarian socialist-sympathizing democratic socialist)
2026-07-12 23:43:47 <xentrac     > and it seems to be pretty effective at reducing mass murder
2026-07-12 23:44:10 <tabemann    > *say
2026-07-12 23:44:12 <veltas      > I like Terence Tao, what a cool guy
2026-07-12 23:44:32 <veltas      > I love that interview with him at ... six years old was it?  Some young age.
2026-07-12 23:44:46 <tabemann    > okay, I do have to head out
2026-07-12 23:44:52 <tabemann    > talk to you later!
2026-07-12 23:44:54 <xentrac     > hmm, I think Switzerland has a better record on libeeralism than it has on democracy.  women have been able to divorce and own property throughout Switzerland for at least a century
2026-07-12 23:44:56 <veltas      > Have fun tabemann
2026-07-12 23:45:04 <xentrac     > I think more like four centuries
2026-07-12 23:45:24 <xentrac     > it's been nice chatting!
2026-07-12 23:45:30 <veltas      > Divorce is more of a man's right than a woman's right
2026-07-12 23:45:55 <xentrac     > that depends on the surroundiong social context
2026-07-12 23:45:58 <veltas      > Yes
2026-07-12 23:46:10 <veltas      > It benefitted men more than women throughout most of history
2026-07-12 23:46:53 <xentrac     > but in Western Europe outside of France, divorce was what enabled women to stop being their husband's property, differing from a chattel slave only in that they couldn't be sold
2026-07-12 23:47:17 <xentrac     > it's true that it often did not benefit them materially
2026-07-12 23:47:45 <veltas      > That's one way of looking at it
2026-07-12 23:47:51 <xentrac     > modern Western Europe, I mean
2026-07-12 23:48:19 <xentrac     > not, like, al-Andalus or the Old Norse kingdoms
2026-07-12 23:49:24 <xentrac     > so that's why I thought it was a relevant metric of Switzerland's historical liberalism
2026-07-12 23:49:31 <veltas      > The way a lot of men are treated now by the courts for divorce is essentially like chattel slavery
2026-07-12 23:49:48 <xentrac     > how so?
2026-07-12 23:50:33 <veltas      > Well like men who in the UK are often forced to pay for their ex's house, lifestyle, the kids, etc and can't afford to buy a house anymore as a result and their life and finances never get back on track
2026-07-12 23:50:55 <xentrac     > that sounds more like taxation than chattel slavery
2026-07-12 23:51:21 <veltas      > That's quite common and often without any fault by the man, in fact it can be entirely the fault of the woman, but makes no difference to the rulings
2026-07-12 23:51:49 <xentrac     > are they subjected to being regularly raped, for eample?  or beaten to death with impunity if they disobey their owners?
2026-07-12 23:52:27 <veltas      > So if your wife gets bored and decides she doesn't want you, you are evicted from your family's home, forced to pay for their house etc, and unable to afford your own dwelling... I would say is comparable to chattel slavery
2026-07-12 23:52:34 <veltas      > A lot of these men do kill themselves
2026-07-12 23:52:38 <xentrac     > I guess sometimes they are separated from their families involuntarily, but they're still allowed to travel at will to visit their parents, aren't they?
2026-07-12 23:53:20 <xentrac     > that doesn't sound like chattel slavery to me at all, although it does sound unjust
2026-07-12 23:53:21 <veltas      > Well it's all relative, you don't really have a lot of freedom if you can't afford anything because all your money is paying for the house you bought but aren't allowed to live in
2026-07-12 23:53:47 <xentrac     > but both the degree and the form of the injustice seem to me to differ greatly to differ from chattel slavery
2026-07-12 23:53:57 <veltas      > If these men complain people blame them and say they should have gotten a better lawyer
2026-07-12 23:54:32 <xentrac     > being blamed for one's misfortune does not seem to me to be comparable to being whipped to death
2026-07-12 23:55:07 <veltas      > Sorry I don't mean chattel slavery, I mean bond slavery
2026-07-12 23:55:39 <xentrac     > and while the US's form of chattel slavery was unusually cruel, I think such abuses are inherent to the institution
2026-07-12 23:55:57 <veltas      > Maybe yeah
2026-07-12 23:56:13 <xentrac     > debt slavery?
2026-07-12 23:56:16 <veltas      > Yes
2026-07-12 23:58:14 <veltas      > I heard 'chattel' and assumed it meant something other than what it did
2026-07-12 23:58:22 <veltas      > I'd not heard that before
2026-07-12 23:59:02 <xentrac     > yes, it sounds similar to debt slavery in some ways
2026-07-12 23:59:13 <xentrac     > much more similar than to chattel slavery
2026-07-12 23:59:51 <veltas      > Frankly a lot of financial / debt situations give people unreasonable power over others, leading to things similar to debt slavery but not quite debt slavery