Damus

Recent Notes

binkle profile picture
why does the brit job list "interest/tax free loans" as a benefit of employment

i have never seen a job listing say something like that before what is going on over there
binkle profile picture
@nprofile1q... @nprofile1q... @nprofile1q... that's true for macro-politics and elite theory, but it doesn't really speak to how common people viewed from an individual perspective are motivated and what they value. I'm not sure many northerners in the civil war were motivated by "we have to kneecap the south's economy" but a good chunk might've been by "slavery is a moral evil", and since we're talking about polling and approval, that would seem to be the prescient thing. Similarly the Hussite Wars may have been started for reasons which are not religious at all (I wouldn't know, I'm unfamiliar with the intricacies but conceding the point for the sake of argument), but the people on the ground, if you were to ask them, would probably say their religious motivations were primary.

the motivations of the elites who start wars are indeed divorced from the motivations of the commoners who fight them, and that means both that you can't necessarily believe the winners who write history, but also that many of the commoners probably would have
binkle profile picture
@nprofile1q... @nprofile1q... @nprofile1q... true. It's probably more like "in the absence of religion something fills the gap" and maslow's hierarchy is what people will tend to be guided by in the absence of strong religious beliefs/society. We just happen to be in a secular time and place so we're guided this way instead of that
binkle profile picture
@nprofile1q... @nprofile1q... I wonder if that correlation weakens as people move away from poverty. I would imagine anyone concerned with keeping food on the table becomes essentially a single issue voter on that point, and the further removed one is the more likely they are to develop pet issues, but that because of the wealth distribution there's a strong bias in polling towards "the economy BETTER be going well or you're out"