Mewis
11mo ago
I think this needs to be said for the sake of those living in the US bubble - the American electoral cycle is very, very unusual. Unusually long and unusually structured. Note that in the past month, both the UK and France have held national elections, had full campaigns, and are now ready to vote. The months and months and months of campaigning and rallying and debating and convening are just not necessary to anything. And I tell you that four months is actually plenty of time for the Democrats to pick a candidate and sell them to the American population, that having the Democrats actually discuss who might be a good President will work better for them than just expecting everyone to get in line for Biden because his turn isn't over yet.
An open convention isn't chaos. It's exciting. It's drama. It's the antithesis of the top down process that gave us Hillary and Biden. It's the antithesis of the control mentality that tried to hide Biden's incapacity until it was too late.
Mewis
1yr ago
I remember reading some accounts that Bill Clinton had an uncanny level of personal charisma that people who hadn't met him just didn't get. I think it's probably a more general quality of today's rigorously competitive political world. Maybe that's why politicians so often come off as incompetent or fake, that they're selected so strongly for personal charisma it leaves no room for other qualities.
Mewis
2yr ago
Do you have anything to offer in support of this account of human interaction or did you just imagine it?
Mewis
11mo ago
https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-i-dont-buy-538s-new-election
FiveThirtyEight versus 538
Nate Silver, public statistician, has launched a broadside against the forecasting blog he originally set up, which continues to produce modelling that indicates a incredible dead heat between Biden and Trump. What gives?
What it really comes down to is how unusual this election is turning out, and how forecasting is not keeping up with reality. On paper, Biden is secure - he's an incumbent President in an America that is peaceful and prosperous. These indicators have been long championed as the surest omens of victory. But nothing lasts forever. As Silver points out, those advantages count for less and less nowadays. And they assume that the candidates are otherwise mentally competent to run an effective campaign. If Biden still retains the faculties to run the country, he's not demonstrating them.
There of course, is a limit to models. We cannot predict exactly how Biden's incapacity might affect the election, or a horse switch to Harris, because events like this have never occurred before in modern electoral history. But it's at the point where these models now interfere with normal political judgement. Biden backers use the 538 model as a palliative, even as Biden slips further in the polls. As a result they are sleepwalking into picking a candidate who himself seems to be sleepwalking.
Nate Silver's own model does give Biden a fighting chance, especially when fundamentals are emphasized over polling. But he himself admits that the model is probably useless by this point, and that polling is a better indicator of Biden's weakness. Silver also has reason to say "I told you so" - he has beaten the Biden is too old drum for years now, and gotten plenty of flak from his own team over it.
Mewis
1yr ago
Other way around, surely?
The fact is, nobody is actually sitting down and crunching the numbers on utils. When it comes to actually making decisions in the real world and not in thought experiments, everyone resorts to the same expedients and heuristics - usually, some combination of virtue ethics and deontology. Don't commit murders, don't be dishonest.
Mewis
1yr ago
It's my own impression that the fiercest advocates for generous asylum policies or even open borders aren't deontologists (who generally have a lot of respect for rules around borders and citizenship), but utilitarians (who are willing to compromise because they value the utility of asylum seekers over maintaining strong borders). It's also my own impression that utilitarians are more vulnerable to charisma and arguments - theoretically a utilitarian is capable of endorsing any behavior if they're persuaded of it's utility, whereas it's much harder to argue a deontologist into bending his own rules.
Mewis
2yr ago
If your friends weaponize their own discomfort and suffering to control your behaviour, they are being manipulative. Under any other circumstance, 'you must agree with me or you hate me and want me to die' is emotional manipulation, plain and simple.
Mewis
2yr ago
The massive growth of the state in the 20th century. For someone living in say, 1850s Russia, it's not hard to see the appeal of anarchism. States mostly did not organize or fund day-to-day services that affected the lives of average citizens. Mostly, taxes were spent on war and extravagances for the royal family, and justice mostly served to defend the rents and property of the aristocracy. Only a small proportion went into charitable institutions which concerned themselves with providing healthcare and education. The government payroll was itself, miniscule - world empires were run by small handfuls of disinterested bureaucrats.
In some cases, increased state provision of services (and salaries) was explicitly done in order to counter anarchism. However, in all cases, it soon became unimaginable to do away with the state entirely. In addition, it made a tempting prize. No longer foes of the state, leftists seek to control it and use it to advance their ideology. Of course, some leftists do occasionally succumb and remember that they're not supposed to like the FBI. But basically every structural trend pushes them further into the arms of the state. There is no other path to power, and for leftists in the PMC, it is as difficult as falling out of bed.
Mewis
10mo ago
https://scholars-stage.org/why-chinese-culture-has-not-conquered-us-all/
You are absolutely wrong here. China has hit it big with Wukong, and also saw success with Genshin Impact. But there are fundamental reasons why these successes are isolated in the big picture. All of these other games you mentioned are designed are Western or Japanese developers.
The first issue here is a lack of cultural exchange, or a lack of equivalent cultural exchange. China writes the code for the newest Call of Duty, but it is obviously impossible that China could have developed Call of Duty, or League of Legends, or Final Fantasy, or any other modern video game touchstone. For that matter, it's totally implausible that they could write a Harry Potter, film an Alien, or produce The Sopranos. This is because the CCP explicitly seeks to reduce foreign cultural influence. But China cannot just adapt JttW and RotTK forever. If they want to make cultural exports, that has to be based on a broader and deeper cultural dialogue than is currently allowed. Final Fantasy could not have existed without Dungeons and Dragons. Anime could not have existed without Disney. K pop could not have existed without Michael Jackson.
On to the second issue - the CCP and their economic management of China. After all, k pop and Nintendo were originally developed for a domestic audience. Why can't China build up a robust video game industry behind the Great Wall and then seek to export? Well, the CCP doesn't really want to. It doesn't want young Chinese men to get soft and fat playing video games. It wants them to look like this, and who can blame them?
https://images.app.goo.gl/iT46jnqmyMuf64TY9
In some ways, this is a mess of contradictions. China wants us to consume and influence its cultural products, but not to consume ours. Its not even sure if it wants to consume its own cultural products, insofar as it interferes with its other goals. If a Chinese product was ever too successful domestically, it's easy to imagine the CCP swooping down on it, just as it has done before. This to say nothing of the way that China regulates its own culture with an increasingly heavy hand.
This is also why Japan and Korea are different. They have robust domestic consumption and cultural exchange with the rest of the west.
Mewis
11mo ago
Yes, the whole Biden/Harris thing reminds me of the bit in 1984 where Oceania goes from being at war with Eastasia to being at war with Eurasia in the middle of a speech, and everyone just turns on a dime (even as Winston and his colleagues at Minitrue have to go into crunch to rewrite their entire history.)
Mewis
2yr ago
These rules are loosely enforced today, but that's part of the slippery slope. It always starts with high minded, vague, non-binding commitments. Then you write some rules and some policies, but of course you're not going to be strict about them. Then when those rules actually get enforced, you can't complain - after all that's always been the rule, and nobody is above the rules.
It's worth asking - when is the right time to make a fuss? When the rule is written, or when the rule is enforced?
Mewis
11mo ago
Google and Reddit killed forums. Now, all Google search gives you is clickbait slop, quora, Reddit, wikipedia and shopping.
Mewis
1yr ago
Yes, though many government departments and place names have been translated into Te Reo as well, with often the Te Reo name taking priority over the English one.
It seems like a pretty spectacularly bad policy, one seemly optimized for divisiveness.
Mewis
1yr ago
Elon really can't win, can he? If he geofences off Russian-controlled areas, he's accused of undermining offensive operations. If he doesn't, then he'd be accused of helping the Russian military.
Note the second paragraph appears to be written in a confusing way
Yes, it's on purpose. Likely, details are being left out to support the preferred narrative.
Mewis
2yr ago
This is a ridiculous stance to take, not really that far removed from 'you survived the last round, therefore you should continue to play Russian Roulette'. No less ridiculous because European governments went to unprecedented lengths to shield households from energy price increases, instead choosing to borrow money to subsidize energy imports and, when they weren't enough, putting the squeeze on heavy industry.
Second, renewable energy is beating new records by the day. In Northern Europe, electricity prices are bouncing around zero and occasionally dipping below the line into negative territory.
None of which matters - you need electricity to flow all the time. Of course electricity demand is low right now - it's 20 degrees outside and the sun doesn't set until nine pm. Renewables are nice to have to supplement the grid, but that's all they do. The fact is that the diminishing returns on building additional wind-solar capacity increase the more you have of it, because you're getting more energy on days like today (when you don't need it) and nearly nothing on days when you actually want it.
Mewis
2yr ago
Bugs cannot be engineered to be bigger than they currently are because their internal biology is designed for being small. They don't have lungs, or blood as we think of it, or complex nervous systems, or a hundred other things necessary for larger animals. In addition, part of what makes insects an 'efficient' food source is precisely their small size and short life cycle.
I don't see the bother even to try. When there are countless mammals and birds and fish around which are already delicious and great food, why choose to try and make perfect future food out of bugs? Why not start with something that is already great and just needs some tweaking?
Mewis
2yr ago
As Hoffmeister noted in his post on the topic, if Penny has posts like many on here indicating that he thinks the homeless are subhuman scum that need to be cleared off the streets, we will know soon. This is quite likely where the story will hinge. Prosecution will aim to portray him as "looking for a fight" and looking for an excuse to hurt or kill someone.
Stuff like this generally isn't admissable as evidence (it wasn't in the Rittenhouse case, for instance). The fact is that idle words made weeks or months in advance are not the same as intent or premeditation.
Mewis
2yr ago
If Joe Biden had been in a coma for fourteen years, nothing would be different. He didn't evolve to his current position after reading philosophy for the past fourteen years, his position changed in perfect lockstep with everyone else on the left - one's beliefs are not arrived at through careful thought, but picked up by osmosis from one's peers.
Mewis
1yr ago
Counterpoint: this same economic malaise is very common among developed Western countries. It is the US that is the outlier here in managing to remain economically buoyant over the past 15 years while peer economies like the UK and Canada have muddled through.
Mewis
1yr ago
That's highly dependent on how people interpreted it. A fair few people castrated themselves, and more went into the desert to pursue lives of extreme asceticism. Remember that early Christians were like, a millenarian cult that believed that Jesus would be back in a few decades... Then a few centuries...
Mewis
10mo ago
If there are people making huge profits, they're not running grocery stores, which as a rule operate on unbelievably thin margins and run losses on some products. Remember - store brands are cheaper than name brands, not the other way around.
Mewis
11mo ago
The real political effect of assassinations is so subject to context and specifics that it's hard to say. Culture is also relevant - in Japan, assassination of politicians rarely results in a martyr effect - if anything, public opinion often ends up turning in favour of the cause of the assassin.
(I suspect that if anything, the supposed martyrdom effect is just a cultural strategy to discourage assassination. When politicians rally behind an assassination victim, they're contributing to a political norm that protects their own behinds.)
Mewis
1yr ago
They are quickly able to learn to consume bottom denominator slop - I don't think they'll learn how to operate machinery or conduct statistical analysis by osmosis.
If all states adopt values antithetical to your own, I think it's a reasonable response to abandon loyalty to nation-states and instead prioritize other loyalties - and if the Chinese give you enough money to set your family up in comfort and style, you might choose them over the nation that discarded you.
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