2rafa
8hr ago
Great post. I do think, though, that if you narrow things down to the modern, “backrooms” type of liminal space, it fits into the broad category of depictions of common dreams. It’s less about horror, or the edge of the forest, and much more about the strange, incompletely recreated, bizarrely navigated versions of reality we dream of. I distinctly remember having dozens, maybe hundreds of individual dreams almost identical to backrooms type spaces (endless corridors and rooms made up of components of buildings I had navigated in real life) before I became familiar with the concept. If I had to speculate I would say that our own generative intelligence isn’t generally able to create fully realistic, fully plausible, fully coherently navigable (in the ‘interior dimensions match exterior dimensions, rooms plausibly fit the space and connect appropriately etc) interactive environments in our head - at least for those who haven’t specifically trained memory palace type techniques, and even those involve only a very limited form of three dimensional reconstruction in some form - so we have these weird spaces we navigate in our dreams, not in a sinister way but in a processing capacity way. The primitive AI we have works in much the same way, it can generate already compelling video and imagery but struggles (albeit ever less so) with multiple angles of the same event or space, with that exact coherence I mention above.
The liminal space idea is just one in a long line of attempts by artists to depict the contents of our dreams.
2rafa
9hr ago
This was what came to mind, too. Minneapolis was spared the ruin of the rust belt, even though it lacked the thing that saved the only other major city in the Midwest (Chicago), which was being the economic capital of the whole region. But over the last 20 years a lot of the economy it did retain has either stagnated or declined.
2rafa
11hr ago
I don’t know much about Iran but I think the Ayatollah and guardian council have much more power than you suggest. The guardian council essentially has absolute power along with the ayatollah (ability to veto any law and disqualify any candidates for any election) and is 50% chosen by him, and 50% elected by the parliament (which the guardian council can, as mentioned, disqualify candidates for).
2rafa
1d ago
If Trump really wants it he can make a deal (under threat of sanctions or impossibly high tariffs on Danish exports) with Denmark to offer a referendum with three options:
- Remain part of Denmark
- Declare independence (leading to economic ruin and the vast majority of the population having to leave as subsidies dry up)
- Become an American territory with a $100k cash payment per person and a continuation of subsidies
My guess is that in this scenario the overwhelmingly Inuit population which has some of the highest rates of alcoholism and suicide in the world will vote for option 3, or a modified option 2 with the explicit promise of an economic suzerainty relationship that is essentially 3 in all but name.
This referendum would conform to both EU and UN guidance on the rights of indigenous peoples and self-determination blah blah blah.
However it would probably also require Congress, and they are both uninterested and know that Trump gains and loses interest in this topic regularly.
2rafa
2d ago
The groypers/tankies/islamists would kill/expel/rape/torture/imprison me anyway, so I’m unclear as to why I owe them any empathy.
And I’m not defending her death. In fact, you can go back to 2020 when I was a comparative moderate (when compared to some regulars) on Floyd because I believed (and still do believe) that on balance, Chauvin’s hold was unreasonable - even if I don’t think he should have gone to jail, certainly not for the length of time he did, for it.
But the episode taught me one thing. If you give the left an inch, they take a mile. If you agree that a single cop did something dumb, you get the police defunded, a wave of ridiculous and damaging woke in the private and public sector, and the greatest crime wave in decades. So while I don’t defend this, I know the only thing for it is to say “OK, what about it?”, to give not one inch.
Yes, or at least he is failing to take the action he should and so allowing that ruin to happen. He should listen to Miller instead of the agricultural lobby.
“If you don’t have borders, you don’t have a country”
- Bernie Sanders (paraphrased)
When you stand against immigration enforcement you stand against the future of the entire civilization we share. You are saying that you want your descendants and mine to live in a dirtier, poorer, more squalid, more corrupt, more unequal, more violent country, forever.
That is treason no less severe than selling nuclear secrets to Russia or Iran, and perhaps moreso. Trump’s loss in 2020 was sealed the second he started showing sympathy to the Floyd rioters. He shouldn’t make that mistake again, and I’m glad that so far the administration is making a strong stand.
If you obstruct ICE in any capacity, why should I care what happens to you, when by your very action you are saying you don’t care about what happens to me?
2rafa
3d ago
This will get regulated eventually. It’s incoherent to apply an entirely different regime to ‘prediction market bets’ than to financial markets, especially when plenty of eg Polymarket markets proxy the regulated securities market (betting on recessions, corporate performance/product, fed policy) as exchanges and others have raised.
There is, like Sloot said, a long history of libertarians and some other people arguing that insider trading should be legal to allow for better price discovery / for market efficiency, that it should be limited only contractually (eg. between employee and employer).
But people instinctually don’t like the idea of insider trading, and so it doesn’t seem coherent to allow it only on Polymarket. The most liquid prediction markets also have a relatively large amount of federally-mandated KYC now, so investigation can’t be substantially harder than for other insider trading.
I think it will happen. Maybe not soon, but eventually. That said, people do get away with insider trading most of the time. There were substantial moves in Israeli securities, in oil, in defense before October 7 for example, presumably because a lot of people knew and those people talked.
2rafa
5d ago
I think it would be reasonable to say “I don’t want to spend 3 hours a day with my kids”. (By the way, the same courtesy should be extended to women who think this, which is a lot of them.)
10 minutes is pretty low though, it’s a way of relatively directly saying that you only had kids to have kids (whether for religious, legacy, accidental or other reasons, or some combination of the above) and don’t really care about them independently of that. Which is OK, but maybe less socially acceptable now.
I was largely raised by nannies until I was old enough to go to school (and I guess the person is talking about preschool aged kids). I have no resentment toward my parents; I had dinner with them most nights from maybe 4 or 5 years old and I spent most vacations with them except for camp in the summer, and that wasn’t all summer anyway. They were loving and nurturing and I still have a strong relationship with them. My mom would take me to the doctor, my dad would read to us at night, both parents always made time to meet the teachers a couple of times a year. That seems reasonable to me.
I don’t know that 10 minutes would.
2rafa
6d ago
If the US is fine with Rodriguez why would anyone expect new elections to be free or fair? If she’s amenable to Trump’s demands then he has no interest in making a big deal of another questionable election result.
2rafa
6d ago
So, from reading the mainstream press this morning (allegedly with sources) the plan now is that Maduro’s deputy (a loyal chavista figure obviously) is in charge, and nothing changes except that the government becomes friendlier to the US state and oil interests? I guess that counts as a win given this was a cheap and successful operation militarily, but for the long suffering Venezuelan people it doesn’t seem to offer much in the way of hope.
2rafa
6d ago
how much damage could a reasonably-competent solitary actor — “a lone man with a grudge against the world,” to quote @Edawayac_Tosscount — pull off in a single “attack”?
Very easy for this discussion to become a Tom Clancy (ghost)writer’s room meeting, but I suspect that in this case the “best” (worst for humanity) option given current technology (e.g., we are probably not yet in the place where a lone actor can use AI and a home lab to synthesize a virus that can kill billions, because I have a strong fear that at that point it will happen) would be to spend time infiltrating some large, possibly mundane, organization and becoming a figure who has operational control over some kind of system (which might not even be a very senior role) where oversight is minimal and a bad actor could deliberately cause catastrophic damage that would either result in a huge number of casualties or result in a smaller number of (or even just one, critical) VIP casualties.
I also remember reading somewhere that nuclear submarine captains have the absolute authority to order nuclear strikes in a dead hand scenario, so maybe that.
2rafa
7d ago
Because since at least 1991 the US has been technically and geopolitically capable of invading Cuba and overthrowing the communists there without provoking a global crisis and hasn’t done so.
2rafa
7d ago
If you’re Maduro and think you’re going to be deposed, that’s when you resign, leave the crown for the next guy, and sail off into comfortable exile in Russia / China / Cuba / Brazil etc. Agreeing to some elaborate scheme where you spend the rest of your life in jail seems like a bad idea.
2rafa
7d ago
or, on the other hand, it might be that the Mormons in the CIA are just vastly more competent than the rest of the government.
2rafa
7d ago
Maduro captured and in US custody. Absolutely unhinged but also, one has to say, immensely impressive move.
2rafa
7d ago
It’s more complex than that, Fuentes actually defended the Monroe doctrine and was ambivalent to sympathetic to attacking Venezuela a few months ago.
2rafa
8d ago
No, it’s different. Public school teachers are paid relatively averagely given years in the workforce and levels of education; a few make $130k but that’s a small minority in the highest paying districts in the country. They are paid toward the bottom of the most common ‘public service professions’ pay scale (cops, nurses, local government workers), especially in red states. In blue states, particularly rich ones in big cities with very high private sector salaries where the ‘we support underpaid teachers’ sentiment is most common they are paid slightly better, but so are the NYPD and nurses who work in Manhattan.
Meanwhile, while Americans have a lot of respect for doctors, I’ve never heard the sentiment that they’re underpaid except from doctors. They might say underpaid ‘compared to’ dislikes groups like CEOs and bankers, but that is more about the latter than the former. “No, I believe my anaesthesiologist should make $900k a year instead of $600k - hell why not a million?” just isn’t really the kind of thing people are saying or thinking.
2rafa
8d ago
That’s nothing new. The BMA (British Medical Association) was the most aggressive and chief lobbyist against the formation of the NHS in the 1940s. Doctors hate single payer because it drives down physician pay. That is precisely a reason to do it.
2rafa
8d ago
The US doesn’t really have a party system like other democracies. There is no Democratic or Republican Party as an actual organization with a Leader and a membership base that pays $100 a year to be a card-carrying Republican and a committee of leaders that picks all the candidates running for every seat. That’s in many ways a good thing, and the result of a popular vote based primary system with open party affiliation, but it also means that the parties are amorphous. Even the National Committees are weird quasi-governmental service operations that manage conventions and assist with fundraising and advertising, they’re not leadership bodies the same way most other countries’ political parties have them, and their managers are neither the leaders of the movement nor have any actual political power if the ‘party’ has a majority in both chambers and/or the presidency.
That context explains why grassroots politics in the US is mostly driven by organizations dedicated to specific policy goals like Pro Life or Pro Choice or anti-ICE or PETA or the NIMBYs or the YIMBYs by whatever name. Around election time huge PAC funding allows paid organizers to fund both volunteered and paid campaigns that operate the way that canvassers to in more traditional party systems, but the ‘social club’ style party all year, every year, is less of an American thing.
When it's single payer it's not really negotiating any more. It's lobbying... and corruption.
If I’m an American citizen (only) and want to become a diplomat or a military submarine captain or a central banker, I pretty much have to work for the government. Making it so that if you want to be a doctor, you (mostly) have to work for the government is no different.
The common pattern with such monopolies is the union or association negotiates not with the government itself but the politicians.
The politicians in single payer systems often stand up against paying doctors more because they know that if they do they have to pay all public sector workers more, and that means their own fiscal priorities often become unaffordable. The incentives aren’t perfect but they’re better than the current system where responsibility is diffused.
This won't occur with things like drug development because those companies are very unpopular; they can offer money but won't have enough to offer in terms of votes compared to the populist who says he's going to fix the prices of new drugs.
There are ways around it. The big drug makers have forced the UK to pay more by threatening to move well-paid pharma jobs offshore for example. Governments fund tens of billions of dollars in medical research, private universities do too. I’m unconvinced there will some collapse in new drug development if single payer happens, the global system might just become more fair instead of the American taxpayer paying for a disproportionate share of medical innovation.
2rafa
8d ago
I just don’t think this applies to a lot of historic conflict since the advent of civilization. When you’re an man in some European country some time in the last thousand years and one year the King and his council decide that you’re at war with this random other European country because of competition over control for the Caribbean or something happening in the Spanish Netherlands (you’ve never met anyone from there) and then thirty years later the next king decides that actually you’re now allies with the people you fought against and your son needs to go off and fight the people you were allies with, this isn’t some deeply visceral intertribal conflict against blood enemies. This is politics. Until the modern period most people didn’t even have what we’d call a modern, nationalist conception of the state or loyalty to it.
For 200 years, immigrant groups have plundered America, destroying everything the Anglo Saxon founding fathers have created. That much is obviously and entirely true. But it also left the descendants of the Irish who destroyed the peaceful, English eastern seaboard, the New England of gentlemen’s clubs and old Boston, long forgotten, the ‘swarthy’ Scandinavians (according to Ben Franklin who settled the Midwest, the Italians and Poles and whoever else poorly placed to frame their own civilizational conflict against later groups of migrants.
Control is too Finnish to be plausibly American. Call me a chauvinist but I just don’t like when especially European game developers try to create authentically or quasi-authentically American spaces, they just can’t do it. It’s fine for Grand Theft Auto because it’s inherently a foreign satire of America, which is fine, but not for things that try to be a little more sincere.
They should have set the game in Finland, which would probably be even more interesting. Hogwarts Legacy suffered from the same problem in reverse, it was clearly created by Americans.
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