4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
<3
User ID: 355
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
18hr ago
I'm a fairly active reporter, only a small percentage of things I report get acted on, and the exchanges when I complained in the open that no action was taken were maybe about 50/50 between very late responses insinuating that it was unreasonable to expect action to be taken quickly, and dismissals with either no particularly coherent reason given or some form of messenger-shooting ("we get lots of people wanting their outgroup to be moderated more").
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
21hr ago
Do we? One of the reasons immigration has been so controversial is by being openly a way for the Left to rig politics by importing paid-up foot soldiers.
At the object level, the person this thread is talking about is Asian-American, a demographic that is hardly solidly left.
I think that first-generation immigrants are essentially guests and should refrain from any public criticism of their host - a policy that I follow myself.
If you are invited to the home of a kid (to be clear, in this metaphor, this is the university community) who has an ongoing conflict with their parents, and the kid brings up the topic, do you side with the kid, the parents, or do you try to awkwardly stay neutral saying it's not your place to meddle?
If you are invited to the home of an adult with roommates (with a jointly held lease) who has an ongoing conflict with their other roommates (say, the majority of them), [same question]?
(Up to you to decide which one of these is a closer model of the situation at hand, though the choice would also reveal something about your understanding of nations.)
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
1d ago
Well, I mean, the implied problem is that only foreigners who have the wrong kind of politics as far as the administration in power is concerned will run into trouble - so as long as you admit international students at all, under this principle, they become a way to bolster the numbers of the pro-government camp on American campuses. Due to the nature of the "marketplace of ideas" at university, this is bound to have adverse effects on the political expression even of native students who happen to oppose the government line.
(On the other hand, if international students are actually all forced to be completely apolitical, this may not make people happy either - I remember hearing complaints about Chinese MA students on this basis from both tribes during my US grad school period)
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
1d ago
Would this argument also work to defend a hypothetical instance of a Democratic administration revoking the visa of pro-Trump (and hence, in particular, in favour of Trump's current Ukraine/Russia policy) students?
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
5d ago
This attitude is not exclusive to America. Brexit is probably a more notorious example: poor Britons who voted Leave correctly identified that their government considered their job not governance but selling them decisions made in Brussels. In their ignorance and naivete, they expected their own government to pick up the slack after leaving and believed they could do a better job of it by themselves. The reality is this: a government used to outsourcing their decision making process and shirking responsibility cannot be expected to suddenly pick up that responsibility when it is placed upon their shoulders.
Why do you figure it is this way around, as opposed to Brussels just being a fig leaf that would let politicians point and say "we had no choice, it was ordained from above" for unpopular policies that they themselves actually wanted all along?
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
6d ago
I get the sense that going too far into this direction may actually turn out to be counterproductive for that goal, though - unlike in the case of the drunk friend, there is no doubt in the case of the Trump administration who ultimately was at the wheel during the "cruel texts", and so for some future Newsom or Buttigieg admin, any loss of credibility would have to factor through the perception that they could be followed by a Vance or Trump Jr. administration that would renege on its predecessors' promises all over again. But the more exceptional Trump's actions wind up being perceived as, the more credible a Newsom/Buttigieg assertion that this was a one-off and appropriate precautions have been taken to not allow a repeat will be, especially if Trump keeps pushing the envelope and winds up being repudiated/defanged/experience a mysterious heart attack/successfully impeached.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
7d ago
I wonder if the Staten Island boat graveyard still is a thing, if that sort of thing is your thing.
My favoured conspiracy theory is that the main utility of this is somewhat similar to mafia initiation rituals: the participants know that everyone gets a nuclear level of dirt on everyone else, which establishes a level of trust that would otherwise be impossible among the powerful and eccentric crowd that is the Who's Who. Every member of the group is incentivised to cooperate with every other member of the group, at least to an extent that nobody feels sufficient spite and desperation to trigger MAD. (Imagine an Epstein Islander were to go to jail for the rest of their life for securities fraud, and felt that the others could have pulled strings to prevent this.) That most men would not exactly be repelled by sexual attention from 16 year olds is just a nice plus that makes recruitment go more smoothly (and perhaps allows participants to deceive themselves that they are just reaping the fruits of power, rather than entering a death pact). On top of that, shared experience of transgression probably builds a feeling of camaraderie.
It's worth noting that corresponding rumours from Europe (the Dutroux case) involves girls that are much younger, corresponding to Europe's lower social and legal age of consent (as American national politics operate according to California rules). This is also consistent with the illegality being the point. (Perhaps Europe's patronage networks are less effective than American ones because fewer men are actually into sexual attention from 8 year olds, creating a recruitment problem for the web of trust!)
The association with, and cultural memory of, secret satanic rituals might just be a holdover from when those were similarly grounds for automatic cancellation no matter how powerful the person engaging in them. The weakening of cultural Christianity, under that theory, necessitated switching from Satanism to underage sex. If the rise of Social Justice had not been halted, we could one day have lived in a utopia where the rich and powerful could just go to some island to hold secret blackface parties, instead of having to diddle kids.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
9d ago
Huh, this is pretty good, and I had previously all but written off SCP as it got flooded by posers who can't write and people rehashing the same tired clichés /r/nosleep style.
Obvious similar recommendation which doesn't seem to have come up in this thread yet is Cordyceps: Too Clever for their Own Good.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
11d ago
It's easy to forget that before the Trump fan/TDS dynamic, a prototype of the same was already being sketched in Obama followers vs. what should in hindsight be labelled ODS. In the same way in which Trump inspires his adherents but inspires revulsion and a resulting willingness to cling to any smear that makes this feeling of revulsion rationalisable and communicable in his opponents, everything about Obama also clearly elicited visceral disgust in his detractors, who were then just searching for a justification to allow them to continue modelling themselves as sensible people who believe things for good reasons. Why does this president elicit such antipathy in me? Ah, right. He is not who he claims he is, and can't even legally be the president. He is a foreign deep cover agent and secret lovechild of Malcolm X raised to be the perfect political cult leader. His wife is also a man. No wonder I disliked him so much. I always had a good intuition about people.
The Trump counterpart are stories like Russiagate and piss tapes. Both of these are much more compatible with the smart critic's self-perception than "I am disgusted by his outgroup mannerisms and the idea of being subordinate to someone like that makes my lizard brain convulse". From the outside, both seem like extremely flimsy rationalisations to reject an elected president - like, so what if he does not meet some technical condition? It's a democracy, and more than half of voters voted for him. Even if Obama is foreign-born or Trump has to go to jail or whatever, people hypothetically should have been able to get the same politics by voting for a stand-in who promises to exactly implement the original's policies but is not encumbered by the gotchas, in the style of Thailand politics.
The Cuban Missile Crisis comparison falls apart because Ukraine wasn't pursuing offensive capabilities against Russia. NATO membership is defensive.
What was NATO defending when they attacked Serbia? I believe the answer that is usually given is "the Albanians of Kosovo", so it seems to be defensive only in a sense that includes non-state entities that are not part of NATO itself. This is a basically meaningless condition, which is moreover also met by Russia's "defensive" campaign in Ukraine.
Conversely, in what way was Cuba pursuing "offensive capabilities" against the US? I'll quote directly from the Wikipedia article:
In December 1959, under the Eisenhower administration and less than twelve months after the Cuban Revolution, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) developed a plan for paramilitary action against Cuba. The CIA recruited operatives on the island to carry out terrorism and sabotage, kill civilians, and cause economic damage.
(...)
In February 1962, the US launched an embargo against Cuba,[26] and Lansdale presented a 26-page, top-secret timetable for implementation of the overthrow of the Cuban government, mandating guerrilla operations to begin in August and September. "Open revolt and overthrow of the Communist regime" was hoped by the planners to occur in the first two weeks of October.[15]
The terrorism campaign and the threat of invasion were crucial factors in the Soviet decision to place nuclear missiles on Cuba, and in the Cuban government's decision to accept.[31] The US government was aware at the time, as reported to the president in a National Intelligence Estimate, that the invasion threat was a key reason for Cuban acceptance of the missiles.
It's also worth taking into account that Clinton actually made suggestive noises to draw parallels between Kosovo (which NATO "defended") and Chechnya, and that NATO is deploying nuclear bombs and missile defense systems in countries that are as close to Russia as Cuba is to the US, but unlike Cuba during the crisis are not regularly being attacked by the respective adversary.
On what basis do you figure that Russia did not invade Ukraine in 2014 due to "not being ready", as opposed to still holding out hope that they could achieve their objectives for it (at the time, they openly angled for a reintegration of the DPR/LPR with the rest of Ukraine under a federal model that would give them a veto over any future attempts to realign Ukraine with EU/NATO and away from Russia) in a cheaper way? If that was the case, Ukraine rushing to go nuclear would have surely just expedited the invasion before Ukraine was ready to defend itself (per the European assessment), and moreover might even have resulted in much more limited Western support as the narrative work to make general populations accepting of proliferation had not been put in yet.
rule-based world order
Rather than using the propaganda term that has a flexible interpretation, could you explain what the specific type of world order you are wishing for is? Is it just the "US playing world police"/pax americana model, where major wars are only to be started with US approval (under threat of US support for the defender) and we have to trust that the US will mostly remain sensible enough to not approve of wars that create too much trouble for us Western forum-goers? As far as I'm concerned, that trust had been long eroded by the wave of terrorism splashing everywhere from their own Middle Eastern misadventures.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
15d ago
the supposedly imminent fall of the strategic town of Pokrovsk at the time of the launch of the Kursk offensive
That seems like another instance of the "Western media proclaims that Russia has some internal milestone, then opines that it's a sign of weakness that the milestone was not met", which has been a recurrent strategy since the start - analogous to if the Russians said that the F-16s were supposed to stop Russian deep strikes, and the circumstance that the interception rate is lower than ever proves that F-16s are trash.
None of the Russian sources I follow seemed to be of the opinion that a fall of Pokrovsk is imminent, or even a high operational priority. Also, manifestly, the Kursk incursion did coincide with an increase of Russian advances, however small - we obviously can't access the counterfactual, but it's quite conceivable that without the Kursk incursion Ukraine could have by now conducted some successful larger-scale counteroffensives elsewhere.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
17d ago
And yes I am heavily, heavily invested in AI companies, so I have some skin in the game.
Do you have any interesting recommendations? It always seemed like apart from Google, the most interesting ones are not publicly traded. MSFT for a while seemed like a way to get exposure to OpenAI, but now there are rumours that they may want to divest.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
17d ago
On the other hand, have you seen old non-computer people trying to play video games? They make a lot of mistakes that sound very similar (due to a lack of "gamer common sense" about what parts of the UI and stage design matter and what sort of objectives there are), and that's with vision that is much less scuffed than whatever vision model has been joined onto the LLM here. I wouldn't be surprised if this turned out to be yet another thing where some token amount of 8xA100 finetuning on actual successful playthrough transcripts for a few games will result in the "play arbitrary games by chain-of-thought" barrier falling faster than substack AI doomers can prepare the next goalpost article (unless they get an LLM to help writing).
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
17d ago
I'm aware of the genetic distance thing. I used the vague "similar" on purpose.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
17d ago
Would you subscribe to the implied principle that the people who deserve land are the original settlers of that land? In this case, in South Africa it would be the Khoisan, not the Bantus who invaded later than the Dutch even. Will you demand the Bantus go back to the jungle so that South Africa can be rightfully inhabited by hunter gatherers again?
No, I think I stand by the rules I outlined here - the Bushmen have no claim against the Bantu except where their lands were directly taken by the latter. That being said, I think a lot of people instinctively subscribe to some sort of notion where sovereignty can be passed more easily the more similar conquerors and conquered are, so for example intra-European border shifts are accepted in ways in which Ottoman conquests in Europe were not.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
17d ago
from what I understand every year Taiwanese begin to think of themselves as more "Taiwanese" and less "Chinese."
I wouldn't count on that remaining the case forever. This form of self-identification is pretty far downstream from information diet, and we might still be in the phase where we are seeing the delayed effects of the 1950s-1990s period in which Mainland China was a relative memetic non-entity, and Taiwan looked to itself (and Japan, and the US) for narratives. In recent years, though, the PRC's output has grown so much that it is pushing to dominate certain segments (live-service games, in particular) even in non-Chinese-speaking locales. What would that be like if you are primarily a Chinese, rather than English, speaker? All my Chinese diaspora friends watch PRC films, listen to PRC music and play PRC games, even if they have no family ties to the mainland, and among them are many suckers for shared cultural patrimony wanks.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
17d ago
Would you subscribe to the implied general principle, though? If a few million Africans snuck into one of the more deserted parts of Wyoming and built a thriving colony there, do you recognise their claim to sovereignty?
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
18d ago
Blues need to make sure Reds are so poor and so uneducated
The standard theory is that as Reds get rich and educated, they overwhelmingly turn Blue all by themselves. It's not like this is unique to the US, either - the educated are high-openness globalists just about everywhere. How do you figure this would be the result of a deliberate Blue ploy, like "make sure" seems to suggest?
I think more than LARP, it's a materialization of the worst of the kayfabe politics that have been spreading everywhere. The idea behind the wording is to suggest that the US has something like anime demon powers where they go "I said KNEEL" and then the lower-powerlevel figures just find their legs buckling for some reason. Of course the US greatly benefits from the perception that it does have those powers, but it doesn't actually have them, and one failed attempt to use them would forever establish common knowledge that it is so and destroy the resistance-is-futile dividend in all future conflicts even against smaller fry. Therefore it finds itself in the awkward situation of having to convince the public that it obviously could do that, but now is not the right time.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
18d ago
Yes, and I think the "her boyfriend is evil/abusive (but she was still staying with him until I came along) and I am much better so surely she wouldn't cheat on me, a much better man" sentiment is part of the trope as well. We need to be careful how much we buy into American propaganda about the Taliban being an unpopular dictatorship - of course they would say that because "we're not invading, we're bringing liberty to oppressed peoples" is an important part of their narrative. The actual observations, including the evident low enthusiasm of most Afghans to defend the American-installed government, the doggedness with which the Taliban and their supporters continued fighting and the ease with which they reestablished themselves after the US withdrawal, as well as the continuous trickle of information about the depravity the US had to enable to keep at least a portion of local elites committed to their cause, is really quite consistent with the Taliban having a Mandate of Heaven over Afghanistan.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
19d ago
I don't think there has to be a reasonable and coherent thought process. It's tempting to think something like "Islam bad and crazy, so anti-Islam ought to be good and sane", but the reality seems to be that being a sufficiently dedicated dissident against a well-entrenched ethno-religious memeplex is rather positively correlated with psychological issues. The n=3 most actively anti-CCP overseas Chinese I knew were so obviously schizophrenic that in one case even the generic soy-enjoying progressive mutual friend warned me about this before introducing them, and in the ideologically more integrated 1970s West one of the main streams of dissidents were people who took the Illuminatus! trilogy seriously.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
19d ago
On one hand, betraying people who you enticed to betray their country to collaborate with you and who risked life and limb to do so seems absolutely dishonourable and shameful, and I don't see how the short-term win and red meat to your base will offset the loss of soft power (and, concretely, the greater difficulty to recruit local cronies in future adventures). Arguably, being perfidious towards its vassals played a part in the ultimate downfall of the British empire; one would think the Americans could have learned a lesson from that.
On the other, there is the old adage that "if she'll cheat with you, she'll cheat on you, bro", so perhaps the US is to some extent justified in looking at those collaborators with disdain.
Not OP, but in my view the least enforced ones are "don't wage the culture war" (typical violation: "how do we best organise to end immigration?"), "write like everyone should be included" (typical violation: "$outgroup behaviour is a disgusting perversion and I am tired of pretending otherwise") and the one against "boo outgroup" posting.
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