MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
14hr ago
London and Paris aren't Jewish enough for that to be the driver at tourist buildings in those cities. The idea that you would have enough shabbot-observant Jews going up the Shard or Eiffel Tower at one time to fill a lift is implausible.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
15hr ago
Agreed - the Appalachian mountain men are the folk heroes of Red Tribe orneriness now, but in the Civil War era they were the least reliable part of the Red coalition, to the point where West Virginia and Kentucky defected from the rest of the south, and the Appalachian bits of Tennessee were not reliable either.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
16hr ago
I think Gorbachev was doing more than waiting for his regime to die, at least in the 1985-9 period. (After the rest of the Soviet bloc collapses, he does seem to be sitting waiting for the USSR itself to die). I don't know how high his chances of success were ex ante, but he was trying.
And of course Deng in China was trying and succeeding.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
18hr ago
There are two versions of the "cause of the South" that were live issues in living memory and which Yankee elites would have preferred to suppress for good reasons.
The notorious one is race-based citizenship rights. Jim Crow was a live issue for a century after Appomattox, and the last unrepentant segregationist in active politics was Trent Lott as late as 2007. The strand of MAGA thought that talks a lot about "heritage Americans" is being deliberately ambiguous about where ADOS blacks (and feather Indians) fit into their ideal America. The Confederate Battle Flag and the veneration of Confederate veterans was, in fact, used as a symbol of opposition to the Civil Rights and an attempt to link Southern regional pride to the political project of opposing Civil Rights, which is why the symbols are as controversial as they are.
The more serious one in the 21st century is the idea of the United States government as a foreign invader. PJ O'Rourke writes in the introduction to the British edition of Parliament of Whores that the genius of the Anglosphere is that we see bad government as more like a broken toaster than a hostile god. Seeing the government as a foreign invader (either in general, or only when it does something you don't like) isn't that. My (limited by youth and distance) understanding of the symbolism when I was growing up was that the Confederate Battle Flag was used as a symbol of this kind of anti-government sentiment (in much the same way that the Gasden flag is used now) in the 1980's and 1990's before it became a red rag to anti-racists.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
20hr ago
I agree that the CSA would have fallen into the British sphere of influence. I assume that some alternative legal structure for unfree plantation labour could have been worked out that wasn't technically chattel slavery and therefore was acceptable to the British* - something similar was done with unfree sugar plantation labour in various British colonies which never had chattel slavery, although not in the Caribbean. I don't know if the CSA leadership would be savvy enough to do that.
* The UK didn't abolish criminal penalties for breach of employment contracts until 1875, and employment contracts which would constitute indentured servitude according to the modern definition were common.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
21hr ago
They barely showed up in low effort online comments. But it would be a challenge for me to find something on my (English) bookshelf that doesn't extensively use them. Let alone doesn't use them at all.
This is the change. Only LLMs and professional typesetters care about the distinction between hyphens, en dashes and em dashes, unary minus signs and binary minus signs. (All are different characters in LaTeX, but the user has to specify which one they want and generally just asks for a hyphen unless they are in math mode). To see a correctly typeset dash in casual online writing is the LLM tell. I don't think LLMs use parenthetic dashes more than I do - admittedly I use them a lot - but I would typeset them as hyphens unless my work was being professionally edited.
There is also a BrE/AmE dimension in that standard British typography (also used across the Commonwealth) sets a parenthetic dash as an en dash between spaces, whereas standard American typography sets it as an em dash without spaces. So Brits (and most non-American English speakers) who don't read print books imported from the US are seeing large numbers of em dashes for the first time.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
21hr ago
No - that's kind of the point. The mountain west of America (outside a small number of national parks and suchlike) is, objectively, a good place to do highly environmentally damaging mining for the same reasons that the Australian outback is (or the central Asia steppe, which is where a lot of it ends up happening). The arctic is the sort of place where you should be more careful.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Huh? I'm pretty sure that the European countries that did permit the use of their bases didn't declare war on Iran.
Nor did the United States - actual declarations of war are out of fashion nowadays.
The serious point is "Did European and Middle Eastern countries which permitted use of bases on their territory to attack Iran think that this was an act of war?" In the case of the UK, the answer is "Yes" - we didn't allow US use of our bases until we felt there was an appropriate casus belli. (Within the region, Iran considered all countries hosting US bases to be fair game even if the bases were not actively being used to attack Iran, and Starmer announced that this constituted Iran attacking neutral countries allowing the British to act in collective self-defence).
Obviously this is cant and countries were making decisions based on politics, just as a decision about whether America is able to use Greenland to attack third countries in the 2030 War of the Big Stupid will depend on politics and not the text of the treaty.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Sovereign states have the obligation to prevent their territory being used to attack states they are not at war with. If the deal preserves Danish sovereignty (and both sides have said that it does) then it de jure requires Danish permission for the US to attack third countries out of Greenland. (As all other similar treaties with basing rights do). De facto the US could always ask for forgiveness and not permission, although that is true now anyway.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
My working theory is that America is building a Golden Dome autonomous supercomputer satellite swarm, built entirely on the back of the Western Hemisphere and the Monroe Doctrine.
This doesn't make sense given the orbital mechanics. If your space weapons are in orbits below GEO (and there are good reasons for not putting them that high), then they are all over the place. The raw materials are also a furphy - space isn't particularly raw materials intensive.
If American did own LEO at some point in the future, they wouldn't need Greenland.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
REE ores are not rare, although mining them is only viable in countries with lax environmental laws.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
There are also some who suggest that the South was unable to wage a guerrilla campaign (e.g. in the aftermath of Lee's surrender) because of poor or brittle morale. This is untrue; the South accepted an outrageous percentage of casualties that would probably have folded up other nation-states, including the Union.
The South did eventually wage a successful Fabian/guerilla campaign. The first attempt (the first Klan) was crushed, but the white South ultimately "won" (in the form of Redemption and Jim Crow) by maintaining the capacity for organised political violence while exhausting the Feds' willingness to keep enforcing Reconstruction. The South may not have been able to do that under the leadership of the planter class - the Redeemer leadership was much less aristocratic than the CSA officer corps or the first Klan leadership.
Ignoring "lose the war but win the peace", I agree with @Shrike that Shiloh was the easiest place to win the war for the South, in hindsight. If AS Johnston (or even Beauregard, who seems to have been a perfectly competent general) defeats Grant's and Buell's armies in detail (as it looked like they probably would on the eve of the battle) then they hold Corinth, which gives the Confederacy a working east-west railway line, and even at a purely tactical level delays the Vicksburg campaign by a year (or indefinitely if the political impact of being routed at Shiloh ends Grant's career). Delaying Vicksburg by a year means that the war is indecisive by polling day in 1864 and McClellan beats Lincoln. In the best case, a victorious Johnston supported by sufficiently talented political leadership is able to flip Kentucky and the war west of the Appalachians is over. Is the minimal intervention for a time traveller to flip the American Civil War simply warning Johnston about the strategic importance of the hornet's nest?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
That movement seems to be a fairly straightforward job protection campaign among creative professionals (who are disproportionately leftist).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
I think elevator operators are standard in tall buildings which are themselves tourist attractions like the Empire State Building, the Shard, the Eiffel Tower etc.
Of course their real job is mostly guest herding, but they do operate the elevator.
This is a statement of an ideal, but it doesn't always work out that way in practice. Particularly in America, people expect to see certain patriotic (and occasionally religious) observances which they see as non-political, but other people see as political. And in many such cases this ambiguity was created deliberately for political purposes.
To take an example that is now sufficiently out-of-date that it doesn't matter any more, the people who normalised the flying of the POW-MIA flag alongside the US flag intended to make a political point by doing so - namely that the US should not normalise the relationship with (notionally communist but, like China, not particularly USSR-aligned) Vietnam until Vietnam did more to ensure the return of Vietnam War POWs and MIAs. But in the current year, someone who said that flying the POW-MIA flag was an anti-Vietnamese statement would attract funny looks.
"Under God" in the pledge of allegiance has a similar history. The conservatives who amended Bellamy's original pledge to add "under God" in 1954 were making a political point about American Christianity vs Soviet atheism. But Michael Newdow was widely attacked (and probably justifiably so) for making the pledge unnecessarily political in 2002.
In contrast, singing the national anthem before football games really was non-politically patriotic in an uncomplicated way until Colin Caepernik messed things up to make his political point. [That isn't a fact of live, it's a statement about American politics at a specific time. Singing the Spanish national anthem at the start of a Barcelona-Real Madrid or God Save the Queen at a Rangers-Celtic match would start a fight]
You can see a similar argument with e.g. confederate symbols in State flags, explicitly Christian Christmas decorations in quasi-public buildings, and Donald Trump making a partisan political speech at the White House Easter Egg Hunt. Scott Alexander had an excellent blog post built around the idea that flying the pride flag in San Francisco is no more or less political than flying the stars and stripes in Peoria.
Stores didn’t go out of their way to support political causes, made up political holidays, or anything along those lines. Sports used to be just games, music used to be just entertainment and movies were just movies.
Was St Patrick's Day a "made up political holiday" and if so when did it stop being one? Celebrating it was controversial back in the day when assimilation of white ethnic immigrants was a live political issue.
Sports are an expression of local identity, and if that wasn't political in mid-20th century America that was a highly contingent fact about history. A Bowl game between Ole Miss and Notre Dame would have been at least as political as the Old Firm derby if such a thing had happened in the 1880s.
I am trying to think of a time when music wasn't commonly political and/or religious, and I'm coming up blank. Both sides of the aisle thought that rock music was political back when it was controversial.
The first feature-length film ever made was, by some definitions, Birth of a Nation. So movies were frequently political, and sometimes explicitly so, from the start.
It remains LDS dogma that the accounts of pre-Colombian white-looking Christians in America in the Book of Mormon are a historically accurate account of events that happened somewhere in the Americas (LDS archaeologists think that Central America is the best candidate, and Google AI suggests that Joseph Smith came to this conclusion himself as soon as he bothered to read up on pre-Colombian America) in the 1st millenium AD, and that Joseph Smith translated the book from the plates. One minor change is that the LDS Church is now willing to be explicit that the English-language Book of Mormon was an inspired translation made with the aid of seer stones, rather than the result of careful academic study of the inscriptions on the plates, but this isn't a change in dogma - just putting a stop to a bad practice of the early Church endorsing children's picture books which showed Joseph Smith working by candlelight with the plates and a notebook.
There appears to be an active programme of LDS-funded archaeology looking for evidence of Nephite and Lamanite settlements in Central America, which (depending on how serious and well-funded it is) implies that true believing Mormons actually believe this stuff.
I don't think Mormonism needs a historically accurate Book of Mormon - in the same way that Christianity doesn't need a historically accurate Old Testament. The power of mainstream Christianity comes from the Cross and Resurrection, and the distinctive power of Mormonism comes from the restored Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthoods conferred on Joseph Smith by angels claiming to be John the Baptist and various Biblical apostles respectively. Whether the prequel material is historically accurate or divinely-inspired myth doesn't affect the end result.
It would not be particularly surprising (although I wouldn't bet on it at evens) that after another 100 years of archaeologists not finding the Nephites and Lamanites that LDS Church abandons the literal truth of the Book of Mormon via progressive revelation.
Mormonism doesn't actually need the plates - given that they now openly admit that Joseph Smith didn't rely on the Egyptian text on the plates to prepare his translation, they could pivot to "the Book of Mormon is a modern divinely inspired account of (real or mythological) events in pre-Colombian America that God gave to Joseph Smith through the medium of the seer stones". But I would eat my hat with a seer stone in it if the LDS authorities ever accepted that.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
It is also why politics is shit nowdays. This matters more.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
And in particular liberal Jewish groups like J Street do not qualify as "welcome in anti-Zionist spaces" based on their opposition to Netanyahu's policies or support for a Palestinian state.
The Palestinian/anti-Zionist movement and its western leftist useful idiots really are committed to the idea that there should not be a Jewish nation-state in the Middle East, and consider this to be an issue where agreeing with them is table stakes to be a decent person.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4d ago
Or to put it more pithily, it's not because he waged the culture war, it's because he lost.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4d ago
create a Food for Palestine tour and donate some of the proceeds to it.
Bono, personally, has very much been walking his talk on starving children in Africa. Most lefty celebs, not so much.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
One of the things that safety-pilled me was thinking about just how much work there still is to do maximising the human benefit of existing models - society still hasn't adapted to a world where an AI assistant with the intelligence of a smart intern is available at a consumer-SaaS price point. As a trivial example, there should be an insanely great agent harness (think Apple-tier) which allows my grandmother to enlist an AI agent to deal with the medical bureaucracy without my having to set things up for her. Part of the reason why this hasn't been built is that the underlying models are improving too fast and too unpredictably to make building it a good business.
A world in which training of new models stopped tomorrow would still see more tech-driven social change in the next decade than we have seen in any previous decade of human history.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
It would definitely have made sense for the US and Iran to co-operate against jihadi Salafism around that time.
I think US-backed and Iranian-backed groups in Iraq were co-operating in the fight against ISIS in the 2010s.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
Doing something unusual (unless it is locally usual in the place/subculture you grew up in) implies high openness to experience, which is correlated with political liberalism (and also IQ, education and whiteness). Any weird hobby will be full of WEIRD people.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
If I went back in time and told you we could destroy Iran's nuclear program at will
12 months ago, the official position of the President of the United States was that you had already destroyed Iran's nuclear programme - which implied that you couldn't destroy it in this war. I have not heard anyone claim credibly that the Iranian nuclear programme is more destroyed now that it was 12 months ago.
I would have been called a crazy Trump fanatic when everyone knows that it's not that simple.
"As of 1st January 2026, Iran has no remaining working centrifuges and their stockpile of 60% enriched uranium is buried under a large pile of rubble" was not a crazy Trump fanatic position.
Berlin is a city-state, so "Berlin city council" has the powers of a state government - this is a case where EU law (which allows EU citizens to vote in "municipal" elections wherever in the EU they live even if they are not a citizen of the relevant country) gives non-German EU citizens more power than the EU intended.
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