Corvos
3hr ago
I noted also at Communion this morning that the Church is (rhetorically) described as Jesus' bride, which strikes me as a weird example of the same thing.
Corvos
22hr ago
This seems like saying, "I always find that if someone is wet, it is because they came into contact with water".
If a bunch of people turn up on your beaches and you can't send them home again because they tore up their papers and their homes won't take them, and you don't want to machine-gun them and bury them in a mass grave, then you have to put them in a hotel or grant them asylum. Is this deliberate policy?
I think it's much more accurate to say that rich, desirable, easily-accessible countries have lots of illegal immigration and undesirable ones don't. Famously the USSR had to put up an actual wall to stop citizens fleeing.
She represents 'England is good, England is beautiful, English people are good, it's our home, all of this is under threat but we can save it together'. From where I'm standing that's immensely serious and substantial, and the ongoing crumpling of British political parties against this sentiment agrees with me. Amelia herself is just a pretty face on top of that, but so is Columbia a face on top of some rather arbitrary assertions.
building what would become the most powerful and prosperous nation on the planet
We did that before it was cool, and God willing one day we'll do it again. The wheel of fate turns and nations rise and fall.
philosophical principles of the American founding
Ethnonationalism and the underlying debate around what underlies culture, how well different ethnicities can live together long term etc. etc. is perfectly serious and substantial, as are more complex philosophical elements of British identity that are harder to pin down. Locke himself was English, of course, and in many ways you could say that it America was built in England even if later generations of pilgrims called themselves American.
Corvos
23hr ago
You have to do both, obviously. Preventing people from committing crimes is good. Finding people who have committed crimes is also good.
Corvos
1d ago
Yeah, the girl I was thinking of had badly-dyed pink hair and was punk-left, thus my left-wing acquaintances getting pissed when I said I couldn't see the appeal.
Corvos
1d ago
I was saying 'humans are polygynous' because (a) that's what we expect looking at other mammals/primates, (b) humans given sufficient resources and power (Emperors, rock-stars, warlords etc.) are often polygynous without strong cultural shunning/pushback, and (c) it seems to me that most men, if asked 'would you like another girlfriend/wife if your current one was open to it' would say 'yes please'.
There do exist many naturally monogamous animal species
But humans are not one of them, and neither are most primates. 90% of bird species are monogamous but only 3-9% of mammals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monogamy_in_animals
To put it another way, male-on-male aggression is adaptive for males in a polygamous society, and so is the female tendency to go for the strongest male because making babies is expensive and time-consuming and making sperm is free.
Corvos
1d ago
Don’t forget that it took a LONG time for Japan to register foreign interest in anime as anything more than cut-price toons for kids. The Japanese didn’t start actively factoring foreign sales into their strategy until, what, 2016? They had to be pursued quite strongly by companies like Crunchyroll before they were persuaded that piracy could be parlayed into real money.
Corvos
1d ago
It would amuse me deeply if the Right managed to claim purple hair in the future, as someone who was once roundly chastised for disparaging badly-dyed danger hair on girls.
Yeah, but in 50 years if we fix the culture, maybe there could be. It’s a hell of a lot better than ‘look, dude, IRL women are going to regard you with utter loathing and contempt for trying to fix the country, and society will punish you any way it can, but it’s still gotta be done’. And besides, everyone knows that anyway, which is why this took off. They’re just temporarily enjoying the thought of a world where it’s not so.
What I mean is that anarcho-communism doesn’t work at all (probably) and that anarcho-capitalism worked a lot better when you had the internal ability within a broadly ancap American society to say ‘fuck you I’m making my own log cabin’ and have that work out pretty ok most of the time.
In general one problem with trying to make alternative societies now is that you are likely to be doing it somewhere inhospitable that nobody else wants to be. Having a virgin, fertile continent makes such things easier.
Corvos
1d ago
I think the Frontier is at least a part of what's putting a thumb on your scale. Both the fact that it was there, and the fact that technologies of transportation and communication didn't allow for any meaningful control over it.
Anarcho-capitalism-lite looks way better when anyone who doesn't like your society can go five miles down the road or get on the railway and find a parcel of beautiful, fertile land upon which the sweat of a man's brow is enough to give him a decent life. It breaks down when it is no longer possible to Exit from a situation you find intolerable and therefore you have to Voice your complaints and coerce people to fix them, and live with the attempts of others to do likewise.
Sidebar because I find it interesting: the visual cortex is much more complex than that. It's more like transmitting an image under compression - you get very broad impressions first and detail is filled in. It's a top-down + bottom-up process so what you see initially is heavily influenced by what you expect to see. Thus the common experience of thinking you've seen a person, then in a couple of seconds you realise it's a tree. Or hearing someone speak, saying 'what?' and then realise you know what they said after all.
Being behind those infernal cookie banners that block all website content until you click an acknowledgement. Hard to believe that's been inflicted on us for over a decade now
As a privacy advocate and a fervent hater of advertising, I will say that the problem isn't the banners, it's the cookies. The EU showed rare common sense by mandating that...
...if you are going to stalk someone on their private machine doing their private stuff...
...until you know enough about them to manipulate them into making decisions they wouldn't otherwise make...
...so you can sell that information to anyone who wants to manipulate them...
...then you have to at least tell the person you're stalking.
The entire tech industry collectively responded by saying 'but if we bug them until they agree to being stalked, then it's okay, right?'
We are not friends in any meaningful sense; you are allied with my tribal enemies, and will be for the foreseeable future.
You are vastly oversimplifying. There are twice as many people in Europe as in the USA - we are not 750 million clones of Angela Merkel or Schultz.
What makes a friend? Personally, I read much of what you write with interest and appreciation. Whatever you may believe, there is some level of sympathy between many Europeans and Americans like you. It's nosediving lately because so many Red Tribers are grinning and making teabagging gestures as Trump threatens to come over and take our stuff because he feels like it and we can't stop him, but it's there.
Sure, Europe and America are too integrated. That's partly because integration has been pursued vigorously by America over the last 50 years for obvious reasons, but it's likely harmful now. But there are levels of integration between 'you are allied with my enemies and I despise you' and 'Europe? never heard of it'.
Corvos
2d ago
Fair enough. I was unconsciously blending in the claims I'd heard made for cars.
Though I do think thta @Butlerian is right that the up-front costs may be high enough that it makes less difference than you think, unless we truly perfect visual-SLAM. Velodyne LIDARs are expensive.
Corvos
2d ago
8 of the top 10 grossing films are American.
It interests me that Japanese and Korean cultural exports are very popular globally while Bollywood seems not to have quite made it. I would be interested in any theories why.
Possibly American occupation of a relatively small country led to more cultural meeting and greater feelings of familiarity. (India occupied by UK yes but India is much bigger and maybe less cultural impact long term especially after decolonisation.) But China buys American/Japanese stuff too.
Corvos
3d ago
One can also be very skeptical of the claims made. I won't claim to have dug in detail but iirc the big claims usually rely on streets being basically clear of non AVs and those AVs all being networked together so they can use the roads incredibly densely.
Corvos
3d ago
No, this is my prediction based on the fact that the government are literally, physically, perfectly capable of applying the same treatment to migrants. They just haven't. There might be pushback, riots etc. but most riots get put down with water cannons eventually. I do not think we lack actual state capacity if we ever decide to us it. The level of migrants in the UK is maybe 10% and if we are talking about conscription then that is a lot of force that can be applied to the task.
Not in Japan it's not. Culture interacts with this, as do policing styles and various other factors.
The natives likely will, the migrants…might, and will find it hard not to. The government is quite capable of exerting its will on migrants and immigrant communities when it wants to, it’s only that it usually doesn’t want to or thinks it isn't worth it. I think many migrants would leave but I don’t think they’d be able to get out of going to war if they stayed.
The whole thing might collapse after a few years like America in Vietnam as the tensions within the nation come back to the surface. Depends on the exact war.
Corvos
3d ago
I am making the point, which should be obvious to anybody, that even a little bitch can stab their 'benefactors' in the back and will at the first opportunity. Even dictators realise that you can't keep the boot down all the time and you have to induce some loyalty in the captured populace. Save those whose penis and need to waggle it about is larger than their brain, and they usually meet sticky ends.
You need a leader like Thatcher who will just say the Americans are right and we need significant change instead of crying about hurt feelings.
And Trump is doing his best to ruin any such person's chances of getting elected. This is why politics requires more than just "HA! AMERICA SMASH!"
This did sort of happen during COVID in a lot of places, though. Why people are storming your city and demanding to see your papers and making you feel afraid of going about your daily life, and whether you agree or disagree matters a lot to how you feel about it. Ultimately people's responses on all sides are going to be politically inflected.
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