Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being a post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man. No one yet has guessed multiple people, or a scholar. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
I find this whole conversation and the intensity of your passion bizarre, but okay.
And I find your attempts to play coy in Kulak's defense silly.
There is no schrodenger's anarchist. Either Kulak can be credited with living up to his standard, or he is not credited.
Setting aside the indisputable fact that you have no idea whether he 'conducted' 'positive action',
I have multiple reasons to believe he did not, including but not limited to previous admissions of absence and his testy defense of absence on grounds of surgery. He deleted that reddit post soon after, but the surrounding claim of surgery is echoed by others including yourself.
it remains the case that even you don't claim he's ever said that someone should intentionally broadcast the matter afterward.
I have, however, claimed that people do not get to claim credit for actions neither they nor anyone else claim they have been a part of.
That would obviously be crazy.
Bravery often is. However, Kulak's call to action was not to be something other than crazy, but to not be a coward. Note the different goalposts. Being non-crazy is perfectly consistent with being a coward.
You know what would also be crazy, though? Being a substacker who makes calls to violence on associated social media accounts while secretly moonlighting as an actual anarchist engaging in political violence. Clearly Kulak is not above being crazy at least some of the time. We are merely in dispute as to how much and when.
After reading your post multiple times it's still not clear to me what inconsistency you're trying to catch him in. What is clear to me is that there's some kind of unseemly antipathy here. At any rate I'm checking out of the conversation and will not be responding further.
I am moved by your attempt to leave with the last word and a final zing, and your confessed confusion on the position that Kulak is a consistent coward by his own standard.
By way of reply, if I knew the answer, and that answer were yes, do you think I'd talk about it?
By way of reply, does your willingness to acknowledge whether someone else is a coward or not change any factor of them being a coward?
In his old reddit posts on the trucker protests, Kulak made cowardness conditional on whether one conducted political violence regardless of being caught and identified. This was a demand for a positive action, and failure to meet that action was a categorical proof of personal failure deserving social contempt. He established no exceptions- inaction itself was proof of failure.
Kulak has also made no claim of having conducted political violence at the time he claimed it was necessary to prove one was not a coward. Nor have any of his sympathizers. In fact, sympathizers have provided claims that he did not meet the non-coward criteria for reasons that did not meet his pre-established exceptions. Further, no claim of compensatory action has been claimed- nothing that might provide absolution for the initial failure if her were physically incapable of prioritizing getting into a protest over his personal health. Which itself is a claim no one has made, least of all his defenders.
The principle of positive claims requiring positive evidence to warrant belief does not get reversed for reasons of OPSEC by people who dismissed fear of discovery or arrest as grounds for non-involvement. 'Oh, Kulak can't admit to conducting political violence- he'd be caught!' is not a basis to believe Kulak lived up to his claimed requirements for not being a coward. Kulak would not admit to have conducting political violence if he had not met the standard. The absence of the claim is not proof of a claim.
None of this would seem to have any relation to whether you would admit to any knowledge or lack of knowledge.
Kulak can be accused of many things but I haven't yet caught him in moral inconsistency.
Kulak being a moral coward would be morally consistent. It might be morally contemptable, but it would be consistent.
Kulak can be condemned on plenty of grounds. As a historian, a literary analyst, even a rhetorician. However, the condemnation of cowardness can be justified by his own standard presented that he presented as a demand for action lest one be dismissed as a coward.
He did not act. Hence, he can be dismissed as a coward. That he makes no claim to having acted in other cases are additional, but redundant, cases for being a consistent coward.
Dean
Flairless
7hr ago
Early 2000s anime had some interesting takes on internet implications. It's something of a time capsule- plenty of acknowledgement of danger / risk / threat (viruses as monsters, etc.), but also mystery / ambiguous potential.
Sword Art really ruined the genre by turning it pure isekai MMO power fantasy.
That's who I'm blaming, anyway.
Why is that fair to him? He set the standard he judged others by, and he can be judged by it in turn. 'Fair' is not 'nice,' it is impartiality.
Did he meet his own standard of sincerity and moral courage that he accused other of lacking if they did not join a violent resistance despite risk of bodily harm as a consequence?
Or did he abstain on grounds of the consequence of bodily harm?
When someone makes moral judgements and accusations of cowardness for others not risking life or limb, the fair response to claims of personal abstainment on grounds of risk of limb if they went forth is not 'oh, you could get hurt? That's understandable.' It is 'so what, coward?'
Particularly since there have many been many other contexts, before and after, for him to have proven his bravery, if he wanted to tie bravery to political defiance and violence.
Your confusion is probably because you are strawmanning an argument I did not make, while conflating different lines of argument, while trying to cite an article as evidence I should reconsider my position even though the article consists of insinuating a charge that the text acknowledges has not happened.
Which is to say, it cries wolf.
I am sure if you continue to push more information of Donald Trump not deporting american citizens without due process you will continue to accomplish more cries of wolf.
Dean
Flairless
13hr ago
My response to the 'missing the old system' is 'the grass on the other side is always greener.' That substack has its own authorial restraints doesn't mean it doesn't successfully establish independence from traditional media constraints. It just means that it's a change of constraints, rather than an absence of constraints.
Which, frankly, is not going to change. In the same way that the abolishment of private markets under communism didn't mean that people didn't have to work for a living, there is always going to be a tension between 'what the writer wants to do' and 'what the paymaster is willing to pay for.' And as long as there is a need to justify receiving limited resources- and there will always be limited resources- there will always be a paymaster in some form.
That doesn't mean that it isn't a net gain. The fact that Tracingwoodgrains and Kulak are equally eligible to make a living giving their opinions is still better than a world where only one or even none of them could because established opinion-generators ran the system like a cartel.
As they say, anything that you do for a living rather than passion, you'll eventually end up economizing to minimize costs- including time and effort- relative to expected income.
When people make their opinions the basis of their livelihood, their future intellectual freedom is shaped by the nature of their payment structure. If you draw a salary, you're not exactly going to be criticizing the hand that feeds you for long. If you make commissions, you're going to optimize for iterations to earn more commissions.
But when you go substack-style subscriber model, you're going to be pressured to keep providing people what they pay money for. The information you have is that they paid money for [x], and your brand grew from your reputation, and thus recommendations, for saying [x]. And if you don't, the subscribers go away. You live or starve by your brand.
In some respects this is more ideological constraining than a salary structure, since a salary-payer may have special interest in your input if you change an opinion. If you live on [organization Y]'s salary-dole, and you raise issue that [organization Y] may not like, that could be really valuable to know. Your reputation for supporting X makes warnings against X all the more credible. It's like if the Catholic Church criticizes papal conduct. If your job is providing advice / recommendations, this is the most important sort of advice you're liable to offer, and thus justify continue paying for. (Up to a point- if you get a reputation to anti-X instead, it may turn differently.)
In a subscriber model, however, going against the audience grain is a recipe for losing buy-in, but without gaining equivalent opposite payments. At which point, a variation of 'the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent' kicks in. Your audience base can remain unhappy and unwilling to fund you longer than you can get by without an audience base, and you can go under sooner than it takes to build a new audience base.
At which point, your incentive structure is that if you want a comfortable existence, don't fail to deliver what keeps you in a comfortable existence.
Can I convince you to try old children's cartoon series, like the original Digimon Adventure anime?
Digimon was a 1999 children's monster anime from Japan centered around a group of children who meet at a summer camp and find themselves in another world. There they are met by monsters both friendly and not as they try to survive and understand the new world they find themselves in, even as their goal is to find their way back home and return to their families. The story follows the children's efforts to survive, which depends on their personal growth, their relationships with each other, and their partnership with the monster-partners who met them on arrival claiming to have been waiting for them from the start. The later is part of the mystery of the plot that unfolds over 54 episodes, each less than half and hour.
This was isekai before isekai became a power fantasy cliche, more Swiss Family Robinson than Sword Art Online. While the format of the show is a literal monster-of-the-week setup, at nearly every stage of the adventure the children are the underdogs running from a far, far more powerful adversary. Rather than an escapist fantasy from Japanese life, it is fundamentally a story of lost-and-seeking-to-return to home and family.
While the production quality is terribly dated by modern standards- late-90s era animation, pre-modern adaptation practices, etc.- it also had strong character writing. 'Came for the monsters, stayed for the children' is how I fondly remember it. Now, that is on the admittedly biased recollections of a children's show from literal decades ago, but japanese anime has (had?) that trait of sometimes smuggling better writing into anime than American children's media of the time.
(There are various sequel series- some direct sequels, some in other settings. The third series, Digimon Tamers, starts as more of an urban fantasy genre, but arguably is better polished due to a smaller character caste and thus more focus on individual character arcs over time.)
What makes me think this might be appropriate to your ask is that the series (or at least the earlier iterations) is that the series is fundamentally a bildungsroman- a narrative focusing on the protagonists' formative years and spiritual education.
The series is fundamentally a collection of character development stories, in which the monsters and the adventure are the framing device for the children to grow, with that maturation being the narrative payoff as much as the ultimate outcome of the adventure. This isn't a mere 'the power of friendship means we win' spiel either- the series takes an Aristotelian approach to character traits, in which a virtue can become a flaw both by its absence and its excess. And this struggle is the basis of character arcs that track the entire series, even as this process is central to the world-building system.
So I thought of this when I read your criteria.
By line...
I am looking for story where group of characters (family or friends) form together a group that is NOT dysfunctional.
I think this qualifies. The groups that form have internal conflicts, but they are conflicts that are worked through. When there is an enduring conflict, it is character-appropriate and often plot-significant.
As a bildungsroman, the story is characters forming into better people. This does mean they start as worse people, but this is generally in terms of 'good-faith kids who are out of their depth and not yet mature' rather than malicious / incompetent / immoral. There is a generally consistent sense of progression, as the character development of the episode is generally permanent going forward rather than something forgotten in the next episodes.
Them dealing with problematic/oppressive/bureaucratic/evil world is fine, in fact I want to have some conflict. On the other hand I do not want them to win effortlessly or get some insanely OP powers that invalidate any opposition. I do not want tragic/bad ending, I also do not want obvious 100% perfect absurd success thanks to blatant plot armor.
Digimon Adventure starts as a survival story in which the world is dangerous, but with heavy distinctions between evil, morally flawed, and dangerous. Most of the series entails the children on the run or otherwise hiding from the Big Bad.
I also want story to not feature blatantly stupid setting or characters that make no sense whatsoever. Initially I phrased it as "no unrealistic stuff" but I am in fact fine with dragon-flying slave traders as antagonists, as long as suspension of disbelief is achievable.
The series is an isekai. The nature of the isekai isn't exactly a meta-mystery (digimon = digital monsters), but is one to the character cast.
If you can adopt the lie of the isekai premise, it is consistent enough in that context. It reflects a now-archaic 'the internet as a wild new frontier, both dangerous and amazing' mentality rather than any current political concept like disinformation or some such.
I strongly prefer avoidance of current politics in either direction, I have seen remarkably few cases where it was done well. I also do not want books that would be recommended only due to current politics, quality of that is even worse.
The series is a Japanese series that predates the post-2000 culture war. It also predates the Japanese moe-phase or isekai-escapist trends of the late 2000s/2010s.
Story may be small scale.
As an episodic series, there are many smaller-scale stories within the larger plot. While there is a constant the-stakes-are-survival context from the start, many individual stories are fundamentally smaller-stakes, like imposter syndrome, overcoming personal failures and guilt, or familial challenges born of love and complication. There is even a story about trying to help a friend who is being scammed and feeling like you are being dragged down with them.
The series does grow in scale and stakes as the internal mysteries are developed, but they fundamentally start at much, much lower scale in their initial premise. The first series starts with a survive-and-return-home premise, and keeps that for most of the series.
(The urban-fantasy series 3 starts as 'how do I keep my baby dinosaur a secret and out of trouble' child's-secret-pet tale, before the real adventure is about trying to find a lost friend. Again, everything else is framing for small-at-heart struggles.)
...so, have I gotten you to consider watching a 25-year-old children's cartoon with terrible-by-modern-standards production levels for your serious fiction fix?
Well, Hlynka was a self-admitted Warhammer 40k player. The Trump-as-God-Emperor meme was directly from 40k-aware communities. Furthermore, iirc Hlynka was an orks player, which is to say low-class social barbarian faction.
Ergo...
[/sarcasm]
Dean
Flairless
18hr ago
Kulak is LARPing an imagined history, not reading the historical texts that he actually refers to. The ancients were extremely conscious of the perils of violence, and, though not always uncomplicatedly, prized mercy and reconciliation as well.
Kulak has made LARPing a revolutionary his financial income. Back in the Canadian trucker protests he made repeated calls to resistance and violence and called it a moral failing for any man not to risk death or hospitalization for the righteous cause... while begging exception since he was already in a hospital for a medical procedure. Gotta look out for you own health first, right?
Alas, any cause that warrants risking hospitalization to prove virtue is worth leaving a hospital that you might be returned to.
Kulak is a modern day version of the man with their rocking chair by the fire who valorizes the virtue of fighting and glory of dying young to defend hearth and home.
Stronger thanks to your expectation that that a story in which Trump is not dispensing of due process should provide a bayesian update that Trump is dispensing of due process.
Particularly given the form of delivery is the common TDS failure mode on the taking Trump seriously versus literally divide, which has been an archetypical form of crying wolf about Trump intents for a decade.
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
Truly, there is a Hlynka-shaped hole in the Motte's discourse.
That doesn't mean a ban should be reversed just for that, and I'm fairly sure he'd respect that reasoning, but it is amusing.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
I am fairly sure experimental heart surgery isn't conducted on children without their parent's informed consent, and a refusal to subject children to experimental heart surgery isn't a basis for taking children away from the parents.
Tracingwoodgrains also has a history of deliberate efforts to undercut the credibility or ability of political opponents to signal-boosting attestations of progressive political excesses, which includes things like the tesla stuff.
Tracing pushes back on a matter of success of tactics towards their preferred outcomes, not kind. Namely, when things are viewed as counter-productive to Tracing's preferences.
Yeah, in 2012, this would've been career-ending for everyone involved, but these are different times. Absolutely nothing comes of this.
Hm? Circa 2012 a leading candidate / political official's career was notably not ended over a significantly more egregious case, and the politician in question didn't even have original classification authority to declassify topics if she wanted to. It was in fact characterized as election interference to acknowledge investigations into the issue, even as non-prosecution agreements were used as preconditions for testimony on factors like destruction of evidence of the affair. And that was in an era where partisans confronting officials in the central seat of government, including elevators and bathrooms, was still considered legitimate protest.
As it turns out, if a political party wins the political argument that blatant security violations aren't disqualifying, they win the political argument that blatant security violations aren't disqualifying. Particularly if they later try and fail to selectively disqualify political opponents on lesser mishandlings, further weakening the premise of the prohibition.
At the end of the day, it benefits a nation greatly if it can make binding commitments about permanent residence being revoked only with due process.
Due process for being revoked also hinges on due process that does revoke, or deny, being honored and not undermined or circumvented willfully or publicly. Otherwise, there is no due process- there is only the binding commitments by those who are able to get away with not honoring commitments against those expected to be bound by them.
If you want a demos to be publicly on board with, say, refugee acceptance, then you need refugee criteria that are not transparently redefined and gamed to facilitate acceptance of people beyond the original concept of refugees. Similarly, if you want there to be public expectation of a judicial review of immigration cases, then there needs to be a basis for there to be an expectation of timely resolution and that migrants won't simply be let go and disappear into the interior. Absent a basis for public trust that the system would work properly, there is likely to be little political traction over concerns that the system won't work properly in other ways. It may be true, but it was already true.
This is not, to be clear, an endorsement. It is, however, an observation.
What we are seeing is a consequence of policy tools that can benefit a nation greatly being changed in ways that destroy public trust and legitimacy in said tools, often because said tools were used for partisan advantage or even abuse. The partisan utilization of said tools, often at the public advocacy of members of those very institutions due to ideological capture overriding professionalism, has led them to no longer being seen as great benefits for the nation as much as benefits to the partisans at the expense of their opponents. That things can benefit the partisans and the country alike has become outweighed by the desire to defy partisan impositions and the who-whom distinction of who has the power to get away with it.
This applies to other beneficial things as well. I think higher education is a good thing. But if you want cross-partisan support of public universities that employ talented foreign professors, then you need to maintain cross-partisan support. This is harder when public universities take open and consistently partisan stances on public issues and their own employment / admission processes. It becomes even harder when said partisans attempt to overtly and covertly circumvent unambiguous legal prohibitions to their partisan preferences. The demonstrated interest in such cases is not 'let's prioritize the public interest'- it is the preservation of partisan interest.
As partisan prioritization prevails, appeals to the broader nation grow weaker. 'Think of the good to the nation from tourism,' for example, will often fall flat if it comes a few years after tourist-centers were attempting to organize boycotts of other parts of the nation over ideological differences.
It might be 'beneficial' to have high public trust in public institutions, but trust does not follow the benefit of having trust. Trust follows from the actions. The more partisan the actions, the more partisan the trust, and thus subject to revocation / reversal with partisan changes.
Yes, this does mean things will get worse before they get better. This is an observation, not an endorsement. But it will not avoid getting worse / get better faster to simply respect an imposed a partisan preference system... particularly when the partisan coalition in question is not a social majority, but has/had conflated institutional capture with social persuasion.
Dean
Flairless
5d ago
If it wasn't gross incompetence, and I personally will not rule that out, then this is the motive I'd expect. Even if you take this as sincere incompetence, then the similar sincerity of Euroskepticism in the chat is as much / more concerning than the use of the chat.
It's bad. Really bad. So bad that quoting it would reveal how bad it is.
It's just seething resentment disguised as righteous outrage, gratuitous profanity shot though every paragraph, bragging about his wife, and never any admission that what Trump is doing makes sense* for him.
On the other hand, the title really is appropriate for it.
There are literally thousands of years of human governance to pick from, but I will confess being curious which four under which government you think are most relevant for judging Donald Trump's inclination to disappearing people.
And yet, your own quote- that you provided to show intent- also demonstrated both an acknowledgement and a non-intent to merely deport regardless of legality, let alone american citizens who are political dissidents.
If you want to insist that half of your own provided evidence of intent is a lie, but that we should use the other half as sincere unvarnished truth in isolation, feel free to go ahead. But the original charge that you responded to the response of was-
You could imagine the Trump administration just disappearing people they find annoying.
Notice how the accusation of what is imagined / forewarned / supposed to be at stake, and why, is moving just a little here? How the bailey was 'disappearing political annoyances,' and how we are shifting to 'wrongly depart American citizens?'
And how you are conflating different cases, with different legal contexts, and thus different due process requirements, in the process?
There are many types of illegal things, of which I am fairly sure you would concede are neither equivalent to or predictive of other illegal things. I am also fairly sure you would even concede that Biden did some illegal things as well. I am not convinced you would take them as evidence of specific accusations of willingness to disappear political annoyances... and Biden actually was part of (at least) two administrations that targeted political opponents.
My position is that you are still crying wolf, and replacing 'racist' with 'fascist.'
Summer Wars, a 2009 movie, is an interesting short-ish experience. It was sort of a... not spiritual sequel, but a 'this is the story we wanted to tell' of one of the digimon movies. Basically an internet-of-things-meets-rogue-AI experience. A nice family story that also balances tradition and progress in a family story context. Only a few hours long.
I sincerely do think the third digimon series in particular, Digimon Tamers, is a well put together series and not-exactly-accidental AI allegory. On top of a bildungsroman for the children, it basically is an 'alignment and conflict between humans and AI' narrative. Once you accept that the digital monsters are AI, you can recognize AI metaphors that would be more coherent decades later, upto and including the limits of government capacity to keep control. This includes an AI developer not recognizing the implications of his invention and having to grow with it as much as guide it (kid makes magical monster who is fundamentally childlike), various AI-growth-risk metaphors, and even rogue AI.
Ghost in the Shell is an older and more adult-focused classic. It's far more in the cyberpunk field of things, but it's a gem for reasons, though reasons include some pretty abstract stuff.
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