Men are biologically disposable. If a nation lost 90% or better of its adult male population, it could still bounce back within a generation or two.
Women have no incentive to change that, and the small fraction of men powerful enough to change it can already exempt themselves from the meat grinder. The remaining men's opinions don't matter.
So this definitely works for hunter gatherers and that’s definitely how humans are architected, I agree.
However, if I think through what this process would look like under modern living arrangements, what would happen? Intensified serial polygamy with a massive increase in single motherhood? Full on polygamy?
Our social structures aren’t really set up to handle that. It seems like it would be so bad for society that I wouldn’t really say men are “disposable” under the current arrangement. More like they are the roof and women are the foundation, maybe.
It’s better to lose your roof than your foundation, sure, but losing your roof is still really bad. It does not really compare to, say, throwing out a paper coffee cup.
If a nation lost 90% of their men, they would be completely doomed. As men are the ones that actually build and maintain basically all the infrastructure and have all the jobs that are actually indispensable.
A nation wouldn't lose anything for not having personal to do all those comfy PR, HR, "therapist", etc, etc, jobs created for modern "progressive" societies to pretend women are just as indispensable in the work place as men.
But it would be completely wrecked if there weren't enough men to build and maintain houses, habitation, do the all the heavy jobs, take care of waste, infrastructure maintenance, work on the energy industries, etc, etc, etc.
"Men are biologically disposable. If a nation lost 90% or better of its adult male population, it could still bounce back within a generation or two.", and who told you this? You expect the 10% remaining population who also do the dirty politics and are powerful by dirty means, will bounce back the country? Men's value comes from their ability for leadership, adventurous, innovative, fearless and rebel mindset. Does women have enough testosterone for these?
> If a nation lost 90% or better of its adult male population, it could still bounce back within a generation or two.
Yes in theory, no in practice for Europe.
Europe population and society collapsed 2 generations after WWII. We are literally discussing the consequences of the collapse here and now.
People also forget European societies were already starting to collapse after WWI as the consequence of a large proportion of the men population being killed or wounded.
Women's lives are valuable, men's are not. This has been the case across basically all societies in human history. Losing a ton of men really doesn't matter too much - especially young, family-less men.
Losing a lot of women, though, is really really bad.
Drafts seem like an outdated pre-globalist concept. Die for the borders nobody respects anyway. You need to be nationalistic when it’s useful to your leaders that hate you. Of course just the natives need to die, all the immigrants won’t be doing that.
Number of characters for the title is limited. And while I wouldn't necessarily call it draconian because after all somebody has to defend my country; it in deed comes as a shock. And it is also shocking that I just randomly stumbled over this news article when this law is in effect already for 3 months. How is it possible that our news talk about all sorts of nonsense but not about something as fundamentally relevant as this ... this is the real shock.
> And while I wouldn't necessarily call it draconian because after all somebody has to defend my country
The ends don't justify the means. Conscription has no place in the free world. It's slavery, plain and simple. Going into the military should be an appealing career choice. Our soldiers are supposed to be highly skilled professionals, not cannon fodder in large quantities.
So, if some other country with different value system attacks your homeland with intention to effectively colonize it then you'd be okay with just letting it happen?
I believe it is up to the free individual to make that decision. I'm not saving the slave ship when I'm treated like one.
ps: There are 8 billion people on this planet, and I've never had any serious issues with any of them, much less a reason to start a war. Governments are always the cause of everyone's misery. Beware of yours!
The regime spent the past 50 years teaching everyone that their nation is just a source of shame and at best just a meaningless social construct, and that their culture and people's history is trash, that really nothing about it is worth saving.
And now the regime wants them to voluntarily sacrifice their lives for it.
Any country that contains millionaires while using military slaves ("conscripts") is evil. If there is clear existential risk then the state should implement wealth taxes to pay volunteer troops instead of enslaving people. And if literally everybody outside the military has been taxed down to the poverty line, and there are still not enough volunteers, it's time to surrender.
I am also surprised that I haven't read about this in German news before. I am following the news. If Trump would have signed an executive order with a similar content affecting US citizen, German media would probably report about this multiple days long with many articles.
I was looking in Google news for other reports about this, but only found an article from Berliner Zeitung published 5 hours after this article from Frankfurter Rundschau.
I am worried about what other information which could be important to me, the news did not report on.
I agree in general. One reason we haven't heard anything about it might be that the administration already admitted that this legislation needs correction or at least clarification, as mentioned in the article.
No, that is not mentioned in the article. The correction and clarification is regarding how exactly this is being implemented. The law is there ... don't think this is a mistake. And there should be serious discussions in a society before something like that is made a law.
I have longed for this feature. For me, it is useful in many scenarios, such as:
* reading two distantly separated sections of a long article on two split tabs;
* reading a research paper on one tab and typing a question to StackExchange on the other;
* reading a scanned book written in French on one tab and using a dictionary on the other.
The article is well written but its title is a click bait. Although the film portrays mathematicians in a negative way and the allegedly hard problem on the blackboard is actually an easy homework exercise that every decent first-year student is able to solve, I don’t think the film has ever gathered any hatred among mathematicians.
Correct, most mathematicians, at least the ones I know, do not actually spend time thinking about Good Will Hunting, but it's the kind of stuff that science writers eat up.
If you want to know a movie that I actually heard mathematicians discussing, it would be "A Beautiful Mind", and then only because some people were complaining about how the minor characters misrepresented the mathematicians and especially how the Princeton Math department was unfairly caricatured in order to create dramatic tension (you need an antagonist, after all).
In reality Nash was treated with incredible generosity and kindness, and was given extreme affordances. For example, he visited Nirenberg at Courant and gave him a stack of hundreds of pages of dense, hand written notes that were the proof of the embedding theorem, and Nirenberg took enormous time to go through it and try to understand what Nash did, and then championed the proof. With no renumeration or credit, just as a professional courtesy and desire to see if the proof is correct. Nash was not easy to work with, but because so many people were willing to devote time to reviewing and correcting the proof -- which took 5 years -- it was eventually published. Moser, Gromov, Chern, and Kuiper all played a massive role, donating huge amounts of their personal time in order to help Nash.
But, as is usually the case with real life, it doesn't make for a good 2 hour dramatic story. It's a shame, because the real story is a great story.
I saw it as a sort of science-fiction - imagine living in a world where the smartest intellectuals all struggled to solve basic exercises about graph theory. Really imagine living in such a world - would you not feel frustrated when you tried to explain this basic concept to these supposed experts and they just didn't get it? The main character must have felt like he was going crazy!
> The muster roll for the garrison of Calais in 1357 shows not only the names of men-at-arms and archers but also the support roles needed: mason, locksmith, fletcher (a maker of arrows), bowyer (a maker of bows), plumber, blacksmith, wheelwright, cooper (maker of barrels), ditch digger, boatman, carter and carter’s boy. One record belongs to a tiler – Walter Tyler. Was this the future rebel leader of 1381, Wat Tyler?
I didn’t know that the surnames Cooper, Carter and Tyler were originated from different kinds of artisans. I didn’t know that there are names for makers of arrows, bows and wheels either. What is carter’s boy? A bellboy for a cart?
A wild guess: perhaps it was the Russian authority, not the site owners, who blocked the traffic. Collective action is usually inefficient. If something suddenly happens in a large scale, more often than not it is caused by a few influential entities.
No, Russian authorities blocked just few critical sites and they all are listed in special registry. Internet is more or less freely available in Russia. The only big things they blocked are YouTube, Instagram, Facebook. And some specific media in Russian. Media in English like WSJ, NYT are freely available.
I'm talking about Cloudflare settings or other blockers.
> Evidently, the missing feature of all e-readers is the addition of bellows.
Nah. I'd say the missing feature of all e-readers is multiple screens bound as a pamphlet that allows users to compare the contents on different pages easily.
It is not a matter of what you think it is a logical fact, part of the definition if you will.
What you call concrete - were the origins of math as we know it. Geometry, astronomy, metaphysics etc they all had in common fundamental abstract thing that we call math today.
Saying “math got abstract” is like saying “a tree got wooden”. Because when it was a seed - it wasn’t yet a tree in a full sense.
Discussions of this sort can easily get chaotic, because people tend to conflate intuitiveness and concreteness. Sometimes the whole point of abstraction is to make a concept clearer and more intuitive. The distinction between polynomial function and polynomial is an example.
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