2rafa
3hr ago
All fair points. I don’t discount the risk of tyranny - North Korea scares me, too. But I also think a lot of our understanding of life being awful in eg the Soviet Union or Maoist China (an understanding that is generally accurate, I think) is because of the terrible ideological choices and economic system that led directly to famine, starvation, poverty, lack of material goods and squalor. Even the extreme violence of the Cultural Revolution - which was bottom-up, not top-down the way that totalitarian state-performed violence is - was part of this.
In fact, the kind of people who were really likely to be persecuted by the KGB were largely what passed for the Soviet upper and upper middle class, people “like me” if you want to take that line of argument, who worked in state administration, running large enterprises, academia, media and so on. Most average working class people had very different problems.
2rafa
6hr ago
The highest crime-related murder rates in the world tend to cap out around 100 per 100,000 per year. The Khmer Rouge murder rate was something like 7,000 per 100,000 per year.
I don’t think counting extremely destructive, ideologically motivated civil conflict as “tyranny” is particularly productive in this discussion, or else plenty of early modern European countries that don’t really count ask ‘tyrannies’ are tyrannies. A totalitarian tyranny isn’t “when you kill half of your population for being the wrong race/religion/sect/caste”, that’s far too broad and common throughout human history. Humans living in tribes before the Neolithic revolution also saw very high male death rates to murder per year in many cases, is that ‘tyranny’?
The reality is that North Korea and Eritrea both probably still have higher quality of life than Haiti right now.
2rafa
7hr ago
It just seems manifestly obvious that the failure state where enforcement melts away is vastly more common that the failure state where the entire country is, essentially, imprisoned. Anarchy and tyranny can co-exist, but anarcho-tyranny is a conservative/reactionary concept precisely because it describes a failure of liberal democracy in which protected, left-friendly groups aren’t prosecuted while unprotected ones are.
2rafa
9hr ago
Both were fine, if not justified (the latter as the narrower question).
In general, people overestimate the risk of tyranny and underestimate the risk of anarchy.
How many truly tyrannical, totalitarian states are there in the world? North Korea, obviously. Eritrea, to some extent. After that the lines get a lot more blurred. You certainly wouldn’t want to be a dissident in Iran or China, but the vast majority of the population is not really ‘enslaved by the state’ (or ‘under constant, totalitarian absolute surveillance with extreme penalties for the tiniest stepping out of line’) the way that people are in a true tyranny.
Even across the 20th century, true tyranny was rare. Neither the Gestapo nor the KGB were capable of it, for example, nor was any CCP domestic intelligence agency, certainly until very recently. In fact, the only major Marxist nation that was truly, terrifyingly totalitarian in the 1984 sense was East Germany.
By contrast, how many ungovernable shitholes are there in the world in which criminals, gangs and others run riot, with the central government hopelessly weak, corrupt or otherwise powerless to stop them? Many, many more. Half of the Sahel, Haiti and a large chunk of Central America, Papua New Guinea, big parts of Somalia and Northern Kenya, large parts of Nigeria and Niger, parts of Syria etc.
We should be much more concerned about anarchy than tyranny.
2rafa
1d ago
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.
2rafa
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
2d 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
3d 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
4d 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
6d 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
7d 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
7d 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
7d 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
8d 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
8d 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
8d 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
8d ago
Maduro captured and in US custody. Absolutely unhinged but also, one has to say, immensely impressive move.
Tyranny is bad, but the argument of my comment was to suggest that - right now - the long term political consequences of mass immigration (a lower trust, poorer, more violent, more unequal and more corrupt country) outweigh the risks that this almost certainly accidental death is a sure sign of descent into tyranny. I also just replied to wandererinthewilderness in this same thread, apologies for not tagging you.
More options
Context Copy link