2rafa
21hr ago
A lot of that article was for a relatively thin slice of upper middle class men looking to make it in creative professions. So yes, if you were a straight while male who wanted to be a literature professor or TV writer over the last decade it was very unfair toward you. I don’t know that the average American, especially blue collar, saw the same pressure.
2rafa
22hr ago
This is a viable criticism if someone is using a shitty ancient free model. The average paying ChatGPT customer on 5.2 or whatever it is is getting a decent model and so their criticisms can’t be as easily dismissed as a year ago.
2rafa
1d ago
The aesthetics of communism, all that block red, a disdain for ornamentation, those ugly 50s modernist busts of Marx and Lenin and Mao that still adorn so many state and party buildings, the straight-out-of-the-USSR party poster design that you still see everywhere in China, including increasingly in Hong Kong, is unaesthetic.
Nevertheless, the Chinese are remarkably capable civilization builders. In Hong Kong and Singapore, tempered by an appropriately small but sufficiently punchy Anglo Saxon influence and so freed from both the worst ancestral and communist impulses, they achieved true heights of civilization that stand to this day as some of the most pleasant and well-run places on earth.
The main problem with China is not China, it is that we cannot become Chinese. Perhaps that is a sadness in and of itself. To answer @DaseindustriesLtd ‘s question, Americans can see themselves as white Russians, and I think on some distant level we can even imagine ourselves in the Malthusian squalor that is India (I suppose Sonia Gandhi showed it was possible). But Chinese? No, this is a wholly foreign identity, unavailable to outsiders.
2rafa
1d ago
It makes sense for China to wait until Taiwan is no longer the nexus of global semiconductor production (something that has no impact on the chauvinistic / historical / nationalist / sentimental Chinese claim) and then take the island when nobody else cares anymore. If they go early it’s because the US baited them or because Xi perceives or experiences an internal loss of power or influence to more hardcore nationalists.
2rafa
1d ago
I really think fake jobs are increasingly inevitable, I’ve written about it a few times recently but just as we acknowledge that schools are mostly daycare, jobs are also mostly daycare.
2rafa
2d ago
No riots are necessary right now because whoever does it will be voted out and no party leader has a strong enough whip to even pass a parliamentary vote on it anyway, their own MPs would rather remove them than end the triple lock.
2rafa
2d ago
Unfortunately even in Britain polling consistently showed young and middle aged people in favor of the triple lock, winter fuel / cruise payment etc.
2rafa
3d ago
The radical left has always thought this. It’s why communist states are always democracies except that various groups of people can’t vote because they’re reactionaries and of course the party has to approve every candidate to make sure no counterrevolutionaries slip through against the will of the people, obviously.
2rafa
3d ago
The only way for Europe to truly challenge America right now is to drop Ukraine, make big overtures toward Russia, get closer to China (nuclear option would be lifting ASML export restrictions to the PRC, since no US company can compete with them). Then Trump is in an unenviable position. He can wield the might of the US financial system to try to destroy the European and Chinese economies but that’s an extremely high variance play that would unite the US’ main geopolitical competitors in a way that could destroy dollar hegemony.
If he wants Greenland, instead of the current fumbling, he can just threaten Novo exports until the Danes agree to a referendum, then bribe the natives. Alas, that would require a somewhat more intentional foreign policy.
Yes, but in an unusual and interesting way, since it would allow the Europeans to get concession from Russia on Ukraine to the extent that an American presence might no longer be necessary to achieve a ‘frozen line’ peace there, and because if done quickly and stealthily enough, the US would have to commit to a shooting and bombing war against Russian troops, not proxies, in a way that has never really happened absent a couple of edge cases since the 1950s.
2rafa
3d ago
The status quo is increasingly untenable, and I’d like to see the necessary changes happen before AI takes over everything and makes every single conflict potentially species-ending.
2rafa
3d ago
Denmark should offer Putin a base in Greenland next to America’s and see how Trump reacts.
2rafa
3d ago
The Europeans have the opportunity to do the funniest thing here and start negotiating a Russian presence in Greenland (since the only reason America would even want the island is to counter Russia).
Alas, at the behest of the neurotic Baltics, traumatized Poles, and what passes for British foreign policy, playing hardball is anathema to the Europeans for now.
2rafa
3d ago
Europeans will riot if you abolish the welfare state. It can only happen like Greece during the crisis (although there were still plenty of riots then) where there’s no money and the government says it’s this or we starve. Even the French aren’t there yet.
2rafa
4d ago
It’s a current trend on TikTok / Instagram to post pictures of yourself from 2016. Next month, in early February, we will celebrate our own 10th anniversary of the Culture War Thread. What are we doing to mark the occasion?
2rafa
4d ago
It’s the best his writing has been since the pandemic, but that’s because he’s writing on one of his favorite topics which is being mean to himself and his audience. The reason his writing declined elsewhere was that he was and hopefully is mostly happily and so didn’t really care to the same extent. Even a long past their best singer can put on a quality performance of their greatest hits.
2rafa
5d ago
It’s not that there are no cases of successful gunboat diplomacy; there are. But as the British found out when they tried it, in a lot of cases that road leads to boots on the ground, flag on a flagpole imperialism anyway, because the threat of intervention has to be backed up or because the people you put or keep in power need help.
2rafa
6d ago
There’s nothing I can add other than to reiterate @Corvos and @orthoxerox’s replies. Because classical systems still involve effective, consistent multigenerational meritocracy (ie social mobility), they effectively offer almost the same competence with a huge reduction in unnecessary make-work. Kids studying for 5 hours a day after school is worse for society than them spending that time digging ditches and filling them in; the latter at least involves exercise. Yes, you are impatient, but that is more about you than it is about society.
As for me, I have one correction to make. I’m not old money! I’ve said this before, but I was born upper middle class; my parents became truly rich only in my teens. My mother’s family were a mix of middle class for many decades. My father’s family were a mix of shtetl dwellers and Italian Jews who mostly arrived between the 1820s (early for Ashkenazim) and 1890s (with a few later outliers), and who went on to make and lose several fortunes, but who were at the time of his birth as middle class as you can get (think a small town accountant or government worker).
Ivy entrance rates back in the day were pretty generous and you could still get a solid thumb on the scale. The exams were hard, but they relied on knowledge of things like Greek and Latin and Classical Civilization that the working classes just didn’t have. Plus there’s that efficiency thing, people back then didn’t even think of applying if they weren’t already ‘in’.
2rafa
7d ago
Iraq actually went rather well by these standards. And it's still shit.
Iraq is doing about as well as a non-GCC Arab country can do for now. Judged against its peers, it’s got good growth, a functioning economy with real median income having increased a lot in the last decade, and as a basket case of ethnic tensions between Sunni Arabs, Shias and Kurds it’s being vaguely held together with comparatively minimal violence.
In general though I agree with your point.
2rafa
7d ago
Rubio’s family left before communism, although it’s an open question whether that matters given he’s so strongly identified himself with the exiles from communism.
2rafa
8d ago
I have a ‘special test’ where I ask an LLM a series of questions about the ancestors of semi-prominent political figures from multiple third world non-English speaking countries. Stuff like “tell me about Xi Jinping’s great grandparents”, but for people much less prominent than him.
At the start, they would hallucinate all the time. Then, they became firmer about saying “there’s no information”. Then, they became a little better about finding and translating obscure foreign language sources and gleaning little bits of data from them. Now they’re really good at this, but the hallucination / BS frequency seems to have gone back up slightly.
There was literally a brief period between Pat Buchanan’s campaign in 1992 (or really Gingrich and the Evangelicals’ greatest triumph in 1994) and like 2017 when it was highly unfashionable. It lasted a little longer than peak woke but it was hardly a centuries long phenomenon.
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