Corvos
4hr ago
Certainly as I Brit I find it hard to see the EU as a guardian of national sovereignty.
‘Dude’? or ‘buddy’?
Reminds me of a Pratchett quote:
He called people ‘friend’. Someone who does that isn’t friendly.
Corvos
14hr ago
You may find this video by David Mitchell amusing.
Corvos
14hr ago
I did intend that more in royal-you kind of way
Allowing the informal/singular you (thou) to die was unironically a huge mistake. If wonder if the French have the same problem with polite 'vous' and plural 'vous'...
[Polls]
Interesting and worthy of thought, thanks.
Thanks for the article! I'm enjoying it so far.
Good! He's one of the only really good bloggers I'm aware of, without any particular crankish tendencies.
That's fascinating. Good news, though: China maintains a nearly full-stack offering, so you have options! I'm not even being entirely sarcastic - out of an excess of masochism, I turned down the usual offer of a VPN when visiting China for the first time and had to live entirely without the American tech stack for a week. It was interesting and entirely viable once you got used to it, though perhaps less so if you live in Europe.
(Caveats: obviously I wouldn't do this myself except in extremis because it's inconvenient and the Chinese will obviously use it to spy on you and control you, but I find it interesting that they saw the danger and the promise of full-stack control so far ahead.)
Corvos
15hr ago
#Fightfor35.
Nah, 'girl' is any woman 15 years younger than the speaker. The same way my 70-year-old relatives talk about a 50-year-old as 'such a nice young man'.
I have no doubt that people think that way. I think that way about a great many decisions of our current Supreme Court. But I think the government should obey them anyway. I thought the Supreme Court judgement striking down Biden's student loan forgiveness was not a well reason decision, but it still would have been wrong of him to say to hell with the court and do it anyway.
Most of the time, most people think this way. But there is a window - broader than the Overton window - that you have to stay inside, or you lose the Mandate of Heaven.
I argue that:
The judiciary must, most of the time, make decisions that people broadly agree with and produce outcomes that they broadly like. This is a fundamental and underappreciated requirement of the Rule of Law.
As America or any country grows more diverse (on many axes) it gets harder and harder to stay inside this window for the majority of people for the majority of the time, with the resulting slow-motion breakdown that we see. FWIW I genuinely don't get the impression that most Trump supporters want a single executive king: instead they want Trump or someone like him to drag the Republic back within their window and then leave it to continue ticking along as before.
If you think we should only have a judiciary if the judiciary makes decisions you agree with and produces outcomes you like and when that doesn't happen we should instead have a single executive take the law and its determinations into their own hands then I think you are anti-American. You are clearly opposed to the fundamentals of the American experiment and what it means to be an American.
FYI I'm not American if you mean that as a personal 'you'. I'm just observing what I see in Anglo countries more generally. But of course many Americans have their own ideas of what it means to be an American! I find this essay very revealing on the topic. It mentions at one point an interview with Captain Preston, a minuteman who had fought against the British.
Excerpt below:
“Captain Preston, what made you go to the Concord Fight [on 19 April 1775]?”
“What did I go for?”
“Were you oppressed by the Stamp Act?”
“I never saw any stamps, and I always understood that none were ever sold.”
“Well, what about the tea tax?”
“Tea tax, I never drank a drop of the stuff, the boys threw it all overboard.”
“But I suppose you have been reading Harrington, Sidney, and Locke about the eternal principle of liberty?”
“I never heard of these men. The only books we had were the Bible, the Catechism, Watts’ psalms and hymns and the almanacs.”
“Well, then, what was the matter?”
“Young man, what we meant in going for those Redcoats was this: we always had governed ourselves and we always meant to. They didn’t mean we should.”[4]
Here is the central problem in American history, as liberty and freedom are essential values in American culture. Scholars have attempted to study it in many ways.
The leading approach might be called the text-and-context method. It begins with American texts on liberty and freedom and fits them into an explanatory context that is larger than America itself. Historians have discovered many different contexts by this method. They variously told us that the meaning of American liberty and freedom is to be found in the context of Greek democracy, Roman republicanism, natural rights in the middle ages, the civic humanism of the Renaissance, the theology of the Reformation, English Commonwealth tradition in the 17th century, British opposition ideology in the 18th century, the treatises of John Locke, the writings of Scottish moral philosophers, the values of the Enlightenment, and the axioms of classical liberalism.
All these approaches have added to our knowledge of liberty and freedom but none of them comes to terms with captain Preston. As he reminded us, the text-and- context method refers to books he never read, people he never knew, places he never visited, and periods that were far from his own time. [5]
That's a big part of the problem, though, right? It's not a legal fact, it's a legal assertion. When the Pope speaks ex cathedra then by the rules of the Catholic church (AFAIK) what he says is true for all time, but that doesn't make it a fact. And indeed, many will completely ignore it because they don't think the Pope is valid (schismatics) or they don't care what Catholic rules say (all non-Catholics).
EDIT:
It's not a legal fact, it's a legal assertion.
For the avoidance of doubt, what I mean is that it's not an actual literal fact like 'the boiling point of water is 100C'. Instead it's an assertion that under the rules of the legal system is treated like a fact, but that doesn't make it literally so.
Okay, that's a consistent viewpoint. I half-agree with it, too. E.g. my opinions of Scotland became sharply more negative after being exposed to the writings of Cybernats (Scottish Nationalists online).
The flipside is that at least in the UK I think we have been building up serious problems that, prior to social media, it was simply impossible to discuss or publicise. I remember Covid, when social media was maximally locked down - the effect of that freezing wasn't that people or politicians became less extremist, it was that it was impossible to publicise any facts or opinions that ran contrary to what was convenient to the administration. That's a big blow in my mind for the 'more controlled communication leads to better and saner politics' hypothesis.
I would say I started getting worried/upset about immigration in 2013-2016 which did coincide with rhetoric ticking up but also with various life changes and pretty high levels of immigration. Likewise my opinions of feminism were worsened by extremely negative feminist rhetoric online (White Male Tears) but also by the behaviour of my actual acquintances. And so on and so on. I think it's both tbh.
Yes, that is the answer of one faction. The answer of the other faction is that they do not trust Jia Cobb and her ilk to determine what is and is not lawful and correct (and they do not always believe that those are the same thing). You can hate that people think that way, but they do in fact think that way.
If I may engage in slightly more naked culture warring, I think that the last ten years can be best modelled as a huge extended temper tantrum by the Anointed, in response to having the basis of their power and their right to wield it challenged. (By Trump in the US, by Brexit in the UK).
Taking over the legal system and the pipeline of legal trainees doesn't actually mean you get to wield the power of the law as you please in perpetuity, but instead means that people will stop taking lawyers and the law seriously. Likewise for the academy, the metropolitan police, the bastions of culture. Ultimately, the power of those things do not come from anything that's written down, they come from the coordinated agreement of many people to take them seriously. That's why England gets along fine with no written constitution. And it's also why no written constitution can survive if it sets itself too firmly against the needs and desires of the populace.
Corvos
18hr ago
How compelling is the story? I tried to pick up D:OS but there's just so much pissing about for stuff that doesn't really feel like it matters. I hoped BG3 would be more emotionally deep and driven.
All of this is happening in the context of a serious battle for authority on a grand scale. Whether the troops should (that's a moral should, not a legal should) be listening to their elected president Donald Trump or U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb is precisely the issue in question. To a big chunk of the country, the legal wing of the government has vastly overstepped its remit and is engaged in constant tendentious legal warfare to undermine the elected leader of the country. They are misusing the authority that they have been given and have no moral right to use the tools that they are attempting to wield.
If you see the world in that way, what is this video saying? Firstly, this video wouldn't be made if the makers didn't think that Trump was giving illegal orders, or was about to do so. So they're not just speaking about a hypothetical, they're standing up and saying, "Either the orders you're being given now, or the orders you're going to get soon, are illegal and you should ignore them". They are not only attacking the president and by extension those who voted for him, they are deliberately attempting to usurp his power of command.
So it's more like,
"Don't listen to the president, listen to me instead." "THIS IS TREASON".
which, yes, it is.
Obviously, this depends on a particular interpretation of events and of the role of law which you don't hold, but that's the reasoning IMO.
EDIT: Not to mention that of course
We need you to stand up for our laws, our constitution, and who we are as Americans.
is going to raise the temperature considerably because it firmly casts Trump's voters and those who approve of his actions as being criminal, unconstitutional and unAmerican. Which is the problem that #Resist has had from the start, because this is a very dangerous place to be if you don't in fact hold majority support. It's more or less how the Right lost control twenty years ago - by framing anyone who wasn't in favour of Christian social teachings and maximally liberal economics as being unAmerican, they made a generation of voters and politicians who didn't care at all about being American on those terms.
Corvos
20hr ago
In theory yes, in practice I think most people do agree that there was a phase change where social media enabled populists and more fringe movements to gain the spotlight and communicate better.
I don't know the mechanism for this. Plausibly, filming a statement that won't go down well with the bureaucrats in front of all your advisors has a chilling effect compared to writing a social media post where thousands of your followers jump in to defend and support you. Also plausibly, gatekeeping is much harder to do on social media compared to official channels.
Broadly I think that both the following are consistent positions:
- "I want politics to be more centrist and less populist/fringe, therefore I want politicians to communicate through slower and more filtered channels".
- "I want politicians to communicate with me and appeal to me directly, without official public guardians silencing them like they used to, therefore I want politicians to continue using uncensored social media".
But I don't think it's true that going back to 90s era communications will still allow 2020s political populism. And I am broadly skeptical of people arguing that it will, because as far as I can tell most of them are arguing for switching back to the old system precisely because they don't like modern populist politics!
Corvos
21hr ago
The problem with this is that it allows politicians to be held hostage by the official communications apparatus. Have you ever watched Yes Minister? Politicians become actors whose only job is to say the lines they're given in the right order, and to take the blame when the Civil Service wishes to assign it to them.
Like it or not, Congressmen need to get reelected and are therefore dependent on comms. The only question IMO is whether you want the propaganda to at least be written (sometimes) and signed off on by the politicians themselves, or whether you want your representatives to be unable to speak except when the bureaucrats arrange and opportunity for them to do so.
To be perfectly honest, I do not think that truly boring politics is compatible with democracy. Japan tends to have boring politics but a) there's a certain amount of grassroots turmoil these days and b) Japan somewhat resembles China in that almost all important debate takes place within a single ruling party.
This certainly wasn't how it was for me. I grew up in a mostly male environment, and I had at least some of these moments with other boys because that's who was around. In general it took a long time to be sure of exactly who and what I wanted, and it certainly happened post-puberty.
I mostly agree regarding female benders
In the UK 'bender' means something quite specific. It makes this thread a lot more fun and also a little difficult to read with a straight face :)
The UK is defined by WW2 (and to a much lesser extent by WW1). Mythologically, we Said No to a European dictator. We stayed the course even when it looked absolutely hopeless, and then with the help of our allies we won and Europe was saved. (As with Napoleon).
Everyone pre-WW2 who argued for a realist foreign policy re: Hitler got egg on their faces. Neville Chamberlain signed an agreement and declared "peace in our time" and was hideously embarrassed when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia almost immediately; Lord Halifax argued for a negotiated surrender which would have lost us a war we were actually capable of winning.
Politically, you can't debate this history without being thought to be secretly on the Nazi side. So anything that looks like giving a European imperialist what he wants will be called appeasement and is an absolute no-no. Even believing what a foreign imperialist says about what he wants makes you a fool.
More intelligent Brits are aware that Ukraine is very unlikely to win but will couch their support in terms of 'Let's help the Ukranians give the Russians a bloody nose. If they can't win then let's at least make sure they take Russia with them'.
Corvos
1d ago
In the UK? Good on them. I'm no fan of Labour but I'm quite happy to recognise when they're doing the right thing, and tbf even Two-Tier Kier seems to have looked in his crystal ball and seen that the current strategy leads nowhere good.
Corvos
1d ago
The ideal progressive policing is that:
- Predicated on the axiom that the cause of crime being bad external circumstances...
- ...police prevent the most serious crimes, as gently and respectfully as possible, being mindful of the fact that it's ultimately not the criminal's fault they're like this...
- ...long enough for activists and technocrats to alleviate the unfortunate circumstances that turn people to crime.
Corvos
2d ago
At the risk of being partisan, it does seem like there's a difference between the President (the highest authority) taking work home with him, and a department head setting up a secret unauthorised server apparently explicitly for the purpose of doing things without oversight. I would say that what Biden and Trump did was broadly on the same level, with Clinton being much more egregious than either.
Corvos
2d ago
It's one of those horrible ironies that you get into the job because you love animals and then you have to keep killing them.
And what, pray tell, might those be? Unless it's something utterly esoteric, or so rarefied as to constitute such a tiny number of people that statistical analysis becomes impossible, I posit that you'll find more athletes than you expect among their number.
Building things, inventing things, writing things. Some athletes, I'm sure, but I doubt many were at the top of the pecking order at school.
From his autobiography:
Fair enough.
Science says so as well: Studies show huge percentages of Fortune 500 CEOs were college athletes, though maybe that's too boring for you again, and the really smart kids are outcasts who do super important stuff like write groundbreaking Harry Potter fanfics or something.
Sarcasm aside, you're correct. I view Fortune 500 CEOs as being glorified babysitters, often barely competent. They're not idiots, often they're quite bright, but they're golden retrievers: they get those kinds of positions by being the right kind of chap who everyone likes, and they try to stay on the horse and not to fuck it up too badly before they leave. Say what you like about Yudowsky - and I do - at least he has ideas. Lots of my most charismatic schoolfriends went into Goldman Sachs and consultancy and the like, it's such a waste.
Kids will recognize a great mathematician if his skill helps him win at cards, or a great prankster who makes everyone laugh, or a great singer if they're trying to form a band. All aspects of human endeavor naturally lend charisma to their practitioners.
Sorry, I'm up too late and a bit bleary, but this just doesn't match on to my experience of life at all. Being good at this stuff (except football) makes you a loser. There is nothing that schoolboys (and often pre-1980 or so the men that they grew up to become) like to sneer at more than some swot earnestly making an effort to be good at things. Good for you if your life experience was different, but read say CS Lewis about his time at school for a counterpoint.
EDIT: I'm probably being a little belligerent. It's not even that I disagree with you completely, it's just the stunning levels of naivete and smugness in that story from Herodotus (on which my own schooling was at least partially based) irritate me. Oh, you didn't kiss the boot when the big kid told you to, and then he had his mates beat you up? Clearly you aren't high-agency and are doomed to a life of sad mediocrity while we reorder our society into bronze age Persia. Let the kids treat each other however they like, all things are for the best in this the best of all possible worlds...
Cope. There is no positive correlation for misfits and genius or success, we just tell ourselves there is because it's a comfortable story to tell to losers.
I'm not saying losers are destined to do well. I'm saying a disproportionate amount of people who make a real difference used to be losers.
most life metrics.
Specifically according to your source*, high-school athletes are more likely to be employed, more likely to have a degree (American universities give athletic scholarships, so...), and more likely to take part in physical sports (again, they're athletes!). I was talking of rather higher ambitions.
Some jocks are very successful
Cameron Howard Winklevoss (born August 21, 1981) is an American cryptocurrency investor, former Olympic rower, and cofounder of Winklevoss Capital Management and Gemini cryptocurrency exchange ... In 2004, the Winklevoss twins sued Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, claiming he stole their ConnectU idea to create the social networking site Facebook. In addition to ConnectU, Winklevoss also co-founded the social media website Guest of a Guest with Rachelle Hruska.
Again, bro getting rich by betting on crypto is frankly the least impressive way of being 'very successful' that I can imagine. He doesn't seem to have done anything actually worth doing in his life, excepting sports if you're into that, just slid naturally into the kind of role that popular studly men do well in. I know lots of these people in the City - they're high confidence and high charisma but they don't actually create anything or achieve anything.
at 14 he got bullied by some older kids
That's not the way I heard it. He did it because his father suggested it. (I will look this up when I can). He was also not very good with people compared to his more popular siblings, and definitely not a 'natural leader' at that age or really for some time.
I'm not advocating for boys organizing the whole of society, I'm advocating for boys (and girls) being allowed to organize themselves in a limited setting.
I meant creating a good society for children, but also you seem to be advocating that the 'natural leaders' of boys and girls should be put in charge of society when they grow up.
*The actual source gives:
Educational
• any postsecondary education after high school for academic credit (i.e., college, university, or vocational, technical, or trade school) by 2000 (8 years after scheduled high school graduation);
• attainment of a bachelor’s degree or higher by 2000;
Labor Market • employment in 2000;
• full-time employment in 2000;
• income in 1999;
Health
• cigarette use in 2000;
• alcohol use in 2000;
• binge drinking in 2000;
• participation in physical fitness activities in 2000;
• participation in group or team sports and recreation in 2000.
I didn’t have any trouble at all, though I did have to sign in with my passport. Only trouble was that my bank kept having a hissy fit and cutting me off. I always travel with some paper money just in case but I could have got into real trouble otherwise.
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