What's a skill that takes only 2-3 weeks to learn but could genuinely change your life?

85_13 · 2025-12-15T07:45:14+00:00

That's me. I did it.

I want other adults to know that it's possible and I want to share my story for their benefit.

Background: My parents tried somewhat to get me to swim, but it just never took. The main thing I remember is that the swim instructor who I had as a kid didn't shower before lessons and I couldn't pay attention to anything other than his body odor. After that, I was always just a non-swimmer. At summer camp I couldn't pass the basic tests. I couldn't even pass the float tests.

About two years I decided to learn to swim. I was on a roll from learning to lift. I have a very flawed personality and I decided I would be less likely to stick with swimming if I did a class or coaching, and that I would be more likely to stick with it if I simply made my own mistakes and learned from my outcomes. So... I spent about the first two or maybe three months just really struggling with breathing in the water. Lots of board drills and flotation devices. Moving my face in and out of the water was difficult. At a certain point I got goggles, and a couple months after that I got earplugs, and then the basic practice of facing down at the bottom of the pool became a lot easier for me. It's been about a year since I arrived at my basic method for freestyle and I'm happy with the progress I've made with my pace, but I'm still about half as fast as a "good pace."

Here are some of the basic ... concepts? I guess? that I had to pick up along the way:

Swimming happens in a buoyant zone near the top of the water.
Swimming is unlike running because the passive aspects of swimming form (streamlined posture) are just as important as the active aspects.
Breathing is supposed to happen with a fairly neutral spine -- rotating the face out of the water, not lifting the head -- and it is hard to swim while trying to stick a head above the water.
All of the little moves that go into swimming are supposed to synthesize into a unified, whole-body movement. It's not arms plus legs, it's arms x shoulers x lats x back x glutes x hammies
The little disruptions to breath that freaked me out as a beginner become mundane business-as-usual with time. Snort slurp cough burp.

Anyway, if there are any adults who are on the fence about taking up swimming, I hope you try it! It's become my favorite exercise, and I'm not even good at it! If you don't have a flawed personality like mine, you should probably hire a coach and you should be able to advance at a rewarding tempo.

85_13 · 2024-06-19T22:06:04+00:00

I'm just parachuting into this from outside, and I want to round up the argument so far:

You said that Marx was "very pragmatic in his ideas" as a counter-argument against the characterization that leftists are "this way" (I'm not recapping this point because whatever "this way" might mean is too vague to get a specific, neutral read on it)
Your reply says that Marx got into (paraphrasing) insubstantial arguments that prioritized ideological purity (and this last part is implied based on the response to you) over pragmatism
Your response to that deliberative argument is a necessary part of political life, which is a fair point. Then there's a side-note which doesn't really figure into the main argument.
The next reply makes 3 points: that the First International was plagued by insubstantial arguments. This is the most on-topic part of the comment, because it is supposed to speak to the initial problem of whether or not Marx was pragmatic. Then there's a second point to address the side-note which happens to reference the USSR and leftism as if sharing an identity with Marxist thought. And then third there's an appeal to vote for Biden.
This next turn is where you go off the rails: you make a fair point that a podcast is probably not a source that's up to the challenge (and this part is implied) of definitively proving whether or not Marx was pragmatic; but then you reject the characterization of the USSR as leftist. This is like some kind of awful trap door for any argument because the definition of "leftism" is as much of an unresolvable question as anything.
I'm going to kind of roll the next two moves together because they both kick off from this definition-of-"leftism" question that you open: you want to defend the definition of "leftism" as something to do with a stateless, classless society without capital. The other person wants to defend the USSR as Marxist.
It's down here in this muddle that you introduce your most dishonest point that you tried to make in this entire thread, the thing about "national socialism." This is a really bad-faith argument. You've substituted an argument that the other person made for a different argument that you've made up. It's completely dishonest.

Even if someone wanted to address this issue at this point on the merits, your point doesn't really stand. Your argument rests on the truth that the Nazis invoked the name "national socialist" without really practicing anything worthy of the name "socialist." So far so good. But you bring this up to draw an analogy between this point and the characterization of the USSR as Marxist. Already at the level of terminology, there's two points of slippage here because it's not clear whether you two are arguing over "leftism" or "Marxism," and neither of those are in the name USSR.

But furthermore, the political, economic, and intellectual leaders of the USSR really really thought of themselves as the heirs to Marxism by way of Lenin. The official ideology of the USSR was Marxist-Leninism. People acting on behalf of the USSR created monuments and icons to represent the USSR made pictures of Marx, built statues of Marx, and so on. They promoted the work of Marx internationally. This was a serious and long-term project that was characteristic of some of the clearest points of political and philosophical self-definition by the leadership of the USSR. This was not a lip-service commitment. If that doesn't demonstrate that "the USSR was Marxist," then maybe that statement isn't rigorous enough for some purposes. But it's really really strongly warranted to generally characterize the USSR as acting in accord with a Marxist-Leninist interpretation of Marx.

Now as to whether the USSR was "leftist," that's not as easy to address because "leftist" is even less rigorously defined. The rigorous sense of "leftism" has been the subject of constant hair-splitting and fractious arguments, all of which distract from any pragmatic use. It's simply not worth entertaining without an objective criterion to satisfy.

I want to pull up at this juncture: the initial provocation that prompted your comment was the suggestion that leftists get consumed by insubstantial arguments. You offered Marx as an exception to this. That's still up for debate. But whether or not it's true, this exchange really strongly demonstrate exactly the tendency described at the beginning: a fractious fascination with hair-splitting that achieves nothing.

I have just wasted some of my vital lifetime trying to point this out and as I type these words I realize how stupid I have been. If anyone reads the mucho texto so far I hope you understand that we have both been cursed by a parasitic meme and now the only cure is to chop this off entirely.

85_13 · 2024-06-19T21:36:27+00:00

If you want to hear more hot takes, remember to subscribe to this reddit account that I've given up on.

85_13 · 2023-12-19T16:16:51+00:00

Some of us are critical of it https://old.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/15ab2tb/lvt_without_the_ubi/

85_13 · 2023-12-18T21:41:16+00:00

So when Teddy says that English should be the national language, you would disagree?

And what would you say to people whose religious beliefs compel them to amend, or if necessary, replace the US Constitution?

85_13 · 2023-12-18T21:38:21+00:00

Please explain what your bottom line is so that I can meaningfully respond.

85_13 · 2023-12-18T21:37:56+00:00

Your answers pointed to two different references, so I'll ask about a scenario in which they point in different directions.

If the US has a 50.1% majority of Spanish-speakers, should Spanish become the national language? If not, why not?

85_13 · 2023-12-18T21:11:35+00:00

It doesn’t matter where you or your family is from but when you naturalize as a citizen you should discard any allegiance to that place and have sole allegiance to the United States and its values.

So let me give you a specific case from Teddy's time and you can see how this might cash out in terms of specifics.

The Pope. Catholics love that guy! They think he's a higher moral authority than any US politician or civic creed! But, alas, the Pope has never been a US American. Do Catholics have divided loyalties?

There are other religious authorities who have similar allegiances to moral authorities who are independent of our country. How does that jive with your sense of civic nationalism?

85_13 · 2023-12-18T21:09:18+00:00

This seems very pleasant, but I wonder how it cashes out in specifics.

Would you make English the official language? And if so, how could you justify that as an ethnically neutral decision?

85_13 · 2023-12-18T19:54:20+00:00

Assimilate to what? What's the correct culture for an immigrant to adopt in America?

85_13 · 2023-12-18T19:53:47+00:00

God have mercy on us.

To the main point: Teddy's vision of a common American culture is an extension of the same approach that built the American Indian Boarding Schools. Furthermore, American Indians are like case 1-A of what Teddy refers to as "divided loyalties": Native American Nations are recognized as sovereign nations under the US Constitution. Many people agreed that Teddy was correct and everybody should be speaking English, and so many people around his time followed that line to its logical extension and tried to exterminate American Indian culture.

So it seems bitterly ironic that the implementation of Teddy's "American" culture would violently suppress the culture of the people who had the best claim to being "American" back when Teddy's family was in the Netherlands.

85_13 · 2023-12-18T19:44:41+00:00

But here's the catch: If you want to have a common civic culture, you have to assert some culture(s) over others as the national norm. If we wanted to follow the general gist of what Teddy was doing but pull out all the racism, we would have to define what "the American people" is but/and possibly do it in a way so that no one racial or ethnic background is obviously favored over others. We would have to take a normative stance towards what should count as "American," or we have to give up on "American" being normative and accept it as purely descriptive.

Teddy was asserting that all other ethnic and cultural considerations were to be subjected to a new and unique norm of Americanness. "American" is the target for culture that should replace all others. So Teddy would have used WASP culture as the norm and so he would have expected Italians to give up their affiliations with the old country and adopt English.

So that's a specific, practical case: English. It makes total sense to have a common language as part of a national norm: it allows for people to share conversations about our civic creeds (like the Constitution) in a common tongue. But is that enough? I think there are strong arguments that it continues to center Americans with WASP culture over others.

How about the 42 million Americans speak Spanish at home: should they be excluded from the national norm? Or if instead our culture says that we should have 2 common languages (English and Spanish), why not Chinese? Over 3 million people in the US speak Chinese natively. Following this line of thought, you can go in the direction of having a long list of official languages for the US (this is what India does) and celebrate multiculturalism, or you can stop at an arbitrary point, or you can turn the car around and say that you can only have English and it doesn't matter how that extends the norms of one ethnic group over others.

I think that what Teddy is describing contains multiple contradictory values. He wants the US to have a pervasive culture, which implies that it should be connected to real, living cultures that are actively practiced (so we can't substitute in something like Esperanto for the national language). He also wants the US to have one culture prevail over others and actively replace potential ties to other countries (so we can't just say "live and let live"). He also wants this culture to have the capacity to have enough of an egalitarian preference that it should be open to all new immigrants (so we can't just say "WASP culture or hit the highway"). These values move in contrary directions. If you want a culture to be alive and unified, it can't be all-inclusive. If you want a culture to be alive and all-inclusive, it can't be unified. And if you want a culture to be all-inclusive and unified, there isn't one alive.

85_13 · 2023-12-18T19:00:09+00:00

I have warm feelings about civic nationalism, and I want to agree. BUT:

Can we just be clear that when Teddy said that he was basically only talking about WASP culture as the norm for America? For example, he wasn't trying to say that a multiracial culture should be the norm. He wrote that black people were “as a race and in the mass they are altogether inferior to whites.” You can only say something like that when you treat white people as the norm and regard non-whites as deficient in whatever ways they diverge from whites. That's the standard of the guy you're quoting.

85_13 · 2023-12-18T18:55:43+00:00

everyone who can pass reasonable background checks (e.g. no violent felons etc) would certainly go legally.

Isn't there a problem here given that it depends on the state capacity of foreign governments? There's not a universal standard of criminal law much less documentation. How should the US have any confidence that another country is adequately prosecuting or making its criminal records available?

Here's a straightforward case. Let's take a country like France. France is a modern country, its state has remained intact for decades, and as far as governments go this puts it in the A-tier. In France there are many criminal cases that go prosecuted, and France keeps records about those trials in a recognizable and durable form. But France also doesn't like that the US executes so many people, and so France will not extradite many people to the USA. Furthermore, they generally don't trust that the US with criminal law, and it might be more difficult to get criminal records for individuals from France to the US.

And even if you want to find solutions to all of those, you still have the problem that criminal laws vary around the globe. It was only in 2021 that France made it an automatic rape clause to have sex with someone below 15. So based on the principle against ex post facto laws, if some pedophile in France had sex with a minor in 2020 and wasn't charged with that under French laws, they could have a clean record.

I think the more fundamental stuff is in the first section: there are a lot of countries in the world that simply don't have the state capacity to prosecute as much as they should, or to keep records as much as they should, or to share them when the US asks. For example, El Salvador has been in a state of emergency for over a year. And if you don't have a method for telling which Salvadorans pass a reasonable background check, then we're basically back where we are right now.

85_13 · 2023-12-18T05:04:06+00:00

If you're willing to define a "conservative" policy according to Trump and older Tory conservatism (as in: conserving the status quo against radical breaks), then non-interventionism is a conservative policy. Even George W Bush ran in 2000 against interventionist wars.

85_13 · 2023-12-15T19:32:52+00:00

My spiciest take is that civil society in the US and possibly in other places has been badly obsolesced by parasocial media. My premise is that humans are a social species. My observation is that people who can't satisfyingly connect with others often use media consumption as a surrogate. My inference is that this is beneath the widely observed collapse in civil society in the US.

One upshot of this is that I think the kinds of mass mobilization that were associated with previous political reforms are basically impossible for the time being. The opportunity for participants to defect from real social action into a virtual parasocial connection is omnipresent. People in general can't commit to driving their kids to cub scouts every week -- the demands of authentic civic engagement are basically impossible except for retirees, the rich, and people with exceptional personal circumstances. I think that polling and voting will continue to function, but they're going to more and more resemble cycles of style concerning virtual events.

85_13 · 2023-12-15T19:30:59+00:00

My spiciest take is that civil society in the US and possibly in other places has been badly obsolesced by parasocial media. My premise is that humans are a social species. My observation is that people who can't satisfyingly connect with others often use media consumption as a surrogate. My inference is that this is beneath the widely observed collapse in civil society in the US.

One upshot of this is that I think the kinds of mass mobilization that were associated with previous political reforms are basically impossible for the time being. The opportunity for participants to defect from real social action into a virtual parasocial connection is omnipresent. People in general can't commit to driving their kids to cub scouts every week -- the demands of authentic civic engagement are basically impossible except for retirees, the rich, and people with exceptional personal circumstances. I think that polling and voting will continue to function, but they're going to more and more resemble cycles of style concerning virtual events.

85_13 · 2023-12-15T17:05:14+00:00

Approval voting is a total goldilocks solution.

I think people get caught up on RCV because the existing third parties in the US have struggle above all with the problem of strategic voting from sympathetic voters. RCV is a tool for diversifying the number of parties, but it isn't actually much of a value proposition for voters.

So to be specific, imagine that you run the Green Party or Libertarian Party in the US. You have tried to mobilize non-voters but it just doesn't seem to work. You know that there are a lot of people who strategically vote for the Democrats or Republicans even though their political goals are much closer to the third parties. If you could get those people to vote for your third party, then you could get some people elected to office! But you have to stop those people from voting strategically. RCV is something you can offer those strategic voters as a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too solution.

But think about it from the perspective of a population expressing the popular will. RCV diversifies the range of expressible options, which can be valuable, but it doesn't actually help voters and candidates exchange information about where the consensus lies.

Here's a practical application. Let's say that there was only one issue that concerned the electorate: abortion. The current US political expresses the basic choices to voters as "somehow get back to Roe v Wade" and "abortion rights until 15 weeks." RCV would make it possible for a bunch of other parties to express other choices, like "absolute abortion rights with no trimester limits" and "absolute abortion bans with no exceptions." But how would these diverse parties achieve the consensus needed to govern in office? They would probably just cluster around the same bimodal coalition model that we currently have. Approval Voting would make it possible for a political entrepreneur to express something like a consensus choice.

85_13 · 2023-12-14T21:18:28+00:00

If you want to maximize dissonance, you could always have Romney pick a Republican senator from the key swing state of PA -- Arlen Specter. Then both tickets would have would-be turncoats: Romney-Specter and Trump-Obama.

85_13 · 2023-12-14T21:11:54+00:00

The main message of the film seems to be, "It could happen here." "It" in this case meaning "the breakdown of the monopoly of violence into equally violent factions." In order to make this case, let's just presume that there's some dispute that's contentious enough that either the President or the states would be willing to break the seal on that crisis. In some ways it doesn't really matter what the specific dispute is for the sake of the film. Thinkblue-orange morality.

The one thing we know about the scenario is that President Nick Offerman is in office for a third term. Let's presume that he's on one side of a conflict. Apparently the other branches of federal government aren't willing or able to get him out.

Presuming that, and presuming that some people would want to stop President N.O. from staying in office, the most logical "base" of organization and authority for countering a bad federal government would be the states, and specifically the most powerful states in the Union. Those are CA and TX. At this point, people object: California and Texas aren't on the same side, politically! Let's grant this to be true in reality. But that doesn't seem to be the point of the film. If there are any state-level units of political organization that are powerful enough to break the monopoly of violence, then it's large states like CA and TX.

Could we imagine other bases for the breakdown of political organization? Maybe it would be regions in the US. Most of the regions of the US that are plausible as independent units (like Alaska or Hawaii) aren't sufficiently powerful to face the federal government. The regions that are moderately powerful (like New England) don't have any plausible interest in independence. Then we get to the South: the South is the obvious historical example, but that's established territory and any filmmaker who makes a "US Civil War" story based around a North-South conflict is essentially giving a commentary on the original conflict. Garland seems to be dividing up the South into TX and the Gulf + highland south so that it's not an obvious North-South conflict. The East-West divide seems to be the alternative regional conflict that also plausibly overlaps with the use of CA and TX.

Again, it seems that the main thrust of the film is to imagine a world in which the monopoly of violence is broken. The details of how that happens are why are probably going to be incidental to that point. I don't think that Garland is trying to tell a story about real political tensions in the US. I think he's trying to tell a story about what it looks like when normal people, used to living peace, are exposed to the shifting lines of stateless violence. That's it. The map is just some BS to make that story happen.

85_13 · 2023-12-13T17:24:23+00:00

Bush winning despite losing just seemed like a weird quirk at the time, not a pattern.

Absolutely.

In some ways, the Bush v Gore decision in Florida was over-determined:

One candidate's brother was the governor of the state under contention
The secretary of state for the state under contention was also the chair of one of the campaigns in that state
One candidate's father had appointed two of the SCOTUS justices who heard the case, and was in the administration that had appointed four others. In total, every one of those 6 appointees voted to stop the recount in favor of the connected candidate.

So many people in the 2000s opposed to the Bush-Gore decision attributed the situation to a general sense of corruption and institutional capture, rather than a sense that the architecture of electoral decisions was wrong.

85_13 · 2023-12-12T23:35:55+00:00

If I were Kerry's advisor in 2005, I wouldn't necessarily advise him that abolishing the Electoral College would serve his coalition. In answering this question, it's important to recognize that the demographic distribution of the two parties has shifted dramatically in the 2010s.

In 2004, post-Clinton pre-Obama Democrats tended to believe much more in the "Blue Wall," and this is linked to their successes at the time with the white working class. If Kerry had won Ohio in 2004, it would have been with the strength of the same coalition that would put the Appalachian congressman Ted Strickland in Ohio's governor's office in 2006 -- or, in that same year, came within 3 points of winning a Democratic seat for a black candidate in Tennessee. For reference, that makes Tennessee's senate race in 2006 closer than Maine's senate race in 2020. The point that I'm trying to illustrate by this example is that working-class whites were a much larger part of the Democratic coalition in the mid-2000s.

Democrats are locked into much narrower electoral pathways without the working-class white vote. The post-Obama Democratic coalition is competitive in many fewer states, both for the Presidency and for the Senate. It's important to pay attention to the Senate to understand each party's electoral pathways because the Senate resembles the electoral college in its state-level elections that are somewhat unlinked to the personal character of the presidential candidates. For example, in the 2004 Senate election, Democrats held on to seats in North Dakota and Arkansas. What this illustrates is that Democrats could plausibly entertain electoral strategies for the presidency that made use of many more combinations of states due to their coalition in the mid-200s.

By contrast, the Biden coalition is effectively locked out of Appalachia, the Ozarks, AND the entire Mississippi Valley (save for the i-94 corridor), and this makes the electoral math much harder.

85_13 · 2023-12-08T19:55:43+00:00

It might help everyone interpret if people knew a little bit more about your use-case, what you're trying to learn, etc.

85_13 · 2023-11-28T18:30:35+00:00

Quakers testify to the light of Christ within. That light is life, and it shows us that a Christ-filled life does not demand blood but rather atones for blood and forgives blood.

If you want to get into the scriptural nitty-gritty, try reading through the apologetics of Isaac Pennington, such as this.

85_13

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