Shrike
6mo ago
Well, the vast majority of people aren't influential, though – I don't think measuring the impact on influential people is the best way to evaluate the extent of repression! To pull out the C.S. Lewis quote:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
I think Putin is pretty clearly the robber baron here, and from what I can tell at least some of the European states (England specifically springs to mind) strike me as aspiring to be omnipotent moral busybodies. But on the other hand, the omnipotent moral busybody-ness is still aspirational, and on the other I think it's important not to underestimate how chilling pushing a few politically influential people off of buildings is on ordinary, non-influential people. So I think it is best to characterize the European state's oppression as different and bad moreso than worse or something like that (and certainly, all else being equal, literally murdering someone seems worse to me than hassling them over their bank account.)
But it doesn't seem to me that it then follows that everyone will prefer bad Western policies to bad Russian policies. I can imagine some people who would be more impeded by German's restrictive speech code than Russia's. It seems to me perfectly reasonable that some people who aren't me have a preference for the latter because of what they value – and surely a nonzero and in fact substantial amount of such people must exist in real life, choosing to side with Russia instead of fleeing Ukraine for a variety of reasons.
Real opposition parties don't exist and elections are faked anyways.
This may be the case, but I've always been a little puzzled at the allegations that Putin systematically fakes elections (versus pushing people off of buildings, which makes a lot of sense to me). By all accounts (including independent Western polling, from what I recall) Putin is quite popular, and should be expected to win elections. It makes me wonder if these allegations are cope from Western elites that can't understand why people would willingly vote for Putin. (The reasons for voting for Putin should be pretty obvious from looking at how Russia has rebounded since the fall of the USSR, although it is possible that he will end up undoing that progress on his Ukraine adventure.)
On the other hand, possibly there's some quirk of the Russian political system (which I am not particularly familiar with) that makes the extra bit gained fraudulently worth it, or some other risk assessment that is opaque to me.
The other option, of course, is that when people say there aren't "real elections" what they mean is that there's enough voter fraud to swing the vote considerably. This seems pretty bad, and much more plausible to me. But I think it's more precise to describe that as fraudulent than faked – maybe it seems like a weird difference, but e.g. I wouldn't argue the 1960 Presidential election in the United States was fake (which, to me, connotes a complete disconnect between the input and output of the votes) even though it was substantially fraudulent (possibly by enough to swing the election).
You may have considerably more insight into this than I do – when you say they don't have real elections, what precisely do you mean?
Shrike
6mo ago
The researchers found that moods were contagious. The people who saw more positive posts responded by writing more positive posts. Similarly, seeing more negative content prompted the viewers to be more negative in their own posts.
This seems very intuitive to me, and I'm not surprised that it's true, and I don't discount the power of the algorithm, but it's worth noting that aggregate results among nearly 700,000 users is VERY different from being able to target a specific individual for divorce. Especially over 700,000 users, small effects that a single user wouldn't notice (or even be affected by) show up, even without any sort of p-hacking.
Shrike
6mo ago
Yes. I just think that in large parts of Europe you're not free to behave counterculturally. In some places (e.g. France' laïcité policies) this is explicit.
Shrike
7mo ago
I don't think, in a conflict like this, there's likely to be a binary, clear cut win/lose situation. Western nations providing aid to Ukraine does two things:
- Increases Ukraine's ability to exercise military power, increasing the odds of a settlement in its favor, on the sliding scale, and
- Increases cost on a hostile foreign power (Russia.) You see some rhetoric along these lines ("killing Russians at no American lives lost is a great deal") in the United States from time to time.
So even if Ukraine "loses" it's possible that military aid to it causes a better outcome than the outcome with no military aid. Notably, the second point holds regardless of the ultimate outcome of the war.
In fairness, it seems possible that things could backfire on one or both of these points (e.g. over the long run Western aid hardens Russian support for the war, driving them to successfully pursue more expansive war aims) – one historical example of this might be England during the US Civil War – but generally speaking "more military power" is traditionally thought to improve ability to negotiate a favorable conclusion to a conflict, even if said conclusion is not entirely satisfactory.
Shrike
7mo ago
As far as I can tell, this absolutely depends on where in the West, and in what aspect you choose to exercise your individual self-determination. If what you want to do is to criticize Vladimir Putin (something that is important, and something I think everyone should be able to do without fear), the West will almost certainly be freer than Russia every time.
If you want to speak your mind on one side of certain other sensitive culture war issues, Russia is freer than England. If you want to go through life wearing religious apparel, Russia is most likely freer than France. If you want to create and run a hyper-nationalist right-wing party concerned with ethnic unity, Russia may be freer than Germany. If you want to display Soviet iconography, Russia is freer than Latvia. If you want to vote for the Communist Party, Russia is freer than Ukraine (not merely because Ukraine has suspended elections, but also because the Communist Party is banned by law in that country.)
Of note in this discussion, Russia has a conscription system, but so to do several Western states, including several in Europe.
My point here isn't "Russia Good Actually" but that Western states very often are extraordinarily repressive, at least by the standards of the United States (but not so much by the standards of the world as a whole). There's an idea that because Western nations generally have some form of democratic government they don't repress minority groups, and I don't think that's true at all.
Shrike
7mo ago
Because it thinks it can win a conventional war with Kiev (and anyway even if it couldn't Kiev doesn't pose quite the threat NATO does.) War with NATO would be (understatement of the week) a much dicier proposition. It's quite possible that you're right and that they would retreat.
But understand that the idea everyone has from the Cold War about how nuclear war consists of hundreds of ICBM launches isn't necessarily accurate. NATO and the Soviet Union both planned on using tactical nuclear weapons in the event of any large-scale confrontation during the Cold War, and they didn't necessarily think this meant Armageddon, although they were cognizant of the risks. Ships routinely deployed with nuclear weapons meant to be used against individual submarines (probably our only means of catching some of the faster Russian submarines for a time.) These weapons weren't weapons of mass destruction in the city-destroying sense; they were used because their explosive yield (by weight) was needed for certain tactical applications (e.g. ensuring an aircraft carrier was sunk, or that a submarine was caught in the kill zone of a depth charge.)
If NATO tanks roll in from Poland, and Russia decides its conventional forces won't cut it but it wants to stick it out, it most likely will fire a low-yield weapon from tube artillery or a cruise/theatre ballistic missile at NATO troops on the ground or at another military target, e.g. a Polish airbase. These weapons are tremendously destructive, but only in a very localized area (think of it as deleting one bunker, or putting a single airbase out of commission. They wouldn't be especially effective against troops on the ground unless they were in a tight formation.) In the past during US exercises, the US response to this has been to launch their own tactical nuclear weapon in response, not to open the ICBM tubes.
The US is skittish about using nuclear weapons on Russian soil (in one past exercise they retaliated with a nuclear weapon launched on a target inside neutral Belarus) so one possible outcome to all of this is that all nuclear weapons are targeted at conventional Russian/NATO forces inside Ukraine in a "non-escalatory" fashion until one side cries uncle.
TLDR; we could all plausibly live through a nuclear war with hundreds of nuclear detonation without any nuclear Armageddon, or even mass civilian casualties. Life in most of the world would continue on as it had, but there would be thousands and thousands of dead Poles (and thousands more dead Russians.)
Shrike
7mo ago
This is almost certainly at least partially correct, imho. Not suggesting that ideas don't have potency (they clearly do, you can trace the intellectual origins of almost any thing back for hundreds of years) but I think that "material conditions" matter a lot more than just some guy having an idea.
One of the interesting things you'll note historically is that most powerful ideas (e.g. Darwinism) aren't (entirely, anyway) original, they keep popping up time and time again until something happens that seems to make them stick. It seems pretty plausible that it's circumstances more than personality (at least in many cases) that causes the "sticking" to occur.
Shrike
7mo ago
Russia officially annexed parts of Ukraine, so under Russian doctrine a US/NATO intervention that aimed to retake Crimea or the other oblasts would be (under Russian thinking) an attack on Russia proper, wouldn't it?
Russian "escalate to deescalate" doctrine would likely involve using tactical, low-yield nuclear weapons on a military target set and then daring NATO to end history by starting a real nuclear war. Or at least that's the theory – who knows what would happen in real life.
I think Trump would try to do what he did when he was in office last time (choke Ukrainian military aid, threaten Putin with insane military escalation) and force a frozen conflict, but that's just a guess.
Given that (as per Western/NATO-aligned sources) the Russians have been shooting down US anti-radiation (IOW, anti-air-defense) and surface-to-surface missiles in Ukraine on the regular, I'm not convinced that an air campaign (which would use munitions we probably have earmarked for a Pacific war) would be an easy and quick fix, even if it was ultimately effective. Similarly the Poles certainly have a very significant military, but (based on a quick glance) they've already donated about a third of their tank inventory (300+) to Ukraine. I can see a world where throwing their remaining 600ish at the Russian army (which IIRC is now about 15% larger than it was at the beginning of the invasion, as per the DoD) results in them getting ground down over the course of several months or years the same way the much larger Ukrainian army has been attrited.
Shrike
7mo ago
I think the idea was that it was supposed to help handle the swarms of Iranian speedboats.
My vague sense of Iranian capabilities is that once we fielded the LCS in numbers their capabilities had evolved beyond merely "100 speedboats with warheads" anyway, although we know from Ukraine that the threat from speedboat swarms is real.
Shrike
7mo ago
I think the neocon interventionist move was "war with Iran." They built the Littoral Combat Ship for a reason, and it wasn't fighting China.
Shrike
7mo ago
Wow, I am shocked, shocked, that the guys who can get away with deploying a mysterious directed energy weapon to debilitating effect that is dismissed by later medical analysis have once again deployed a mysterious directed energy weapon to debilitating effect that is dismissed by later medical analysis!
I don't think Russia is the Great Satan, or something, and I think it is unwise to take everything that Western intelligence community types say at face value, so I'm open minded about alternative explanations, but Russia microwaving US IC personnel isn't super surprising to me.
However, it's quite possible, maybe even likely that Russia isn't deliberately trying to injure people, and that these aren't weapons at all – this could be a side effect of intelligence gathering work. It turns out that if you beam enough energy at an electronic device, like a phone, you can scoop information off of it – and there's some evidence that the Russians have used that on high-ranking US officials in the past (such as, the President and First Lady of the United States). This would make their actions much more reasonable, I think – instead of just doing a little high-powered trolling for no real gain, they may be trying to scoop sensitive data using aggressive means.
Since the US has the same technology (and thus possibly has created its own fair share of victims in using it) that might explain the somewhat mixed messaging from within the government – plausibly revealing all we know would reveal our own capabilities.
Shrike
7mo ago
Congratulations! Being younger makes it easier to raise young kids, I think. Obviously everyone has their own life situation, but I think it's good to start reasonably young if you can! Glad it is working out for you :) What percentage would you say of each of the themes you mention? Is there a lot of overlap?
Shrike
8mo ago
I suspect PokerPirate's suggestion is something more fundamental; namely that the skillset or talent-set of "good at reading books" and the skillset or talent-set of "good at accomplishing military objectives via maneuver warfare" are not the same skill/talent set.
Shrike
8mo ago
In the scientific field, predictive power is generally taken as evidence of correctness. I think part of the reason that even some of the non-religious posters around here are so sympathetic to religion is because they recall all of the religious conservatives making directionally-accurate predictions about the results of political progressivism a decade or two ago. Perhaps they don't think it is correct, but they do see that it has insight.
I think part of the other reason (for the non-religious posters) is that they are familiar, either in their personal lives or via the field of social studies, with the fact that religion is very good for people. There's a whole host of research that shows this, and of course it is often apparent from observation as well. Does this mean religious claims are true? By itself, not necessarily – but, again, it seems to suggest insight.
And then of course there's the fact that more than a few of the posters on this board (including myself) are Christians, and there are probably some of other religious persuasions here as well, so it makes sense that they would treat religion as a serious topic, because they – like most people, including I suspect most rationalists – think that it is serious. Certainly it has serious influence.
Shrike
8mo ago
The time and energy requirements needed for interstellar travel so high that any non-supernatural (i.e. angels or demons etc. instead of spirits) explanation for UFOs is prima facia false.
I mean, I get where you are coming from, but the main objection to interstellar travel isn't energy (you could do it with Voyager 1 amounts of energy) it's just time. Which humans have very anthropocentric ideas about that may not generalize to any other entities out there.
Most of the barriers on interstellar travel are barriers on human interstellar travel, that vanish if you have a relatively long time horizon and are fine sending GPT as your ambassador instead of a human. We could almost certainly send a (very small) spacecraft to another star in my lifetime via a starwisp if we really wanted to (and maybe we will!) Relatively fast nuclear-powered travel is also theoretically possible (it should be within the laws of physics, but obviously that's a huge engineering challenge!)
With slightly more advanced technology than we have now, it should be possible to send some sort of a small constructor (not grey goo, or anything crazy like that) that could construct larger devices. Iterate to even more advanced technology, and it could even construct lifeforms ("biologics") in artificial wombs, or, even if not from scratch, from frozen embryos.
Thus you could have a situation where there are little green/grey men crashing spaceships in New Mexico like all the most far-out theories claim without breaking any physical laws, or really any novel technology that humans haven't already considered and mathematically sketched out since the early Cold War.
Frankly, I think the weird reported behavior of some of the objects (e.g. instantaneous acceleration) is much more of a problem from a physics/materialist view in my mind than the problem of interstellar travel. And of course ironically is that we have much better reasons to believe there is something out there engaging in eye-wateringly fast acceleration within Earth's atmosphere than we do that it came here from Over There. So while I'm sympathetic to the "it makes more sense for it to be supernatural" approach, I really don't think interstellar travel is the barrier that some seem to think it is. It's just that interstellar travel might not look like Star Wars.
Shrike
8mo ago
You're correct, I think, that truth doesn't necessarily imply specific policy recommendations. But there are truths and there are narratives and when people are advancing a narrative I think it's fair to interrogate the truth behind it. And I think the truth of the claim itself is arguably fairly boring to talk about, in a sense, for a few reasons:
- it's fundamentally predicated on scientific analysis that requires a certain amount of savvy to grok
- even if you can grok the analysis, most people lack the personal context to more-than-generally analyze the credibility of those doing the analysis
- talking about what to do if it was true is just much more interesting than debating whether or not it is true
You can see this in a lot of areas – for example, squabbling about if a specific theory of physics or quantum mechanics or the Drake Equation isn't nearly as interesting for most people (and much harder to do responsibly) than speculating about the impact of the implications.
Everyone should interested in whether HBD is true, trying to craft policy based on fundamental misunderstandings of reality is bad and anyone living under those policies should want the truth to be known.
Well perhaps trying to craft policy based on this stuff is what Hlynka objects to generally. That's what I was trying to get a sense of.
Shrike
8mo ago
It does seem like (unsurprisingly, I guess) a lot of people right and left converge on "the Problem with Society is [my pet "structural" peeve], not 'merely' [poor moral choices], and to solve it we will need [new sociological insights and methods] because [traditional cultural and legal incentives] are boring insufficient to the crisis we face."
Which I think is not dissimilar to how things were around 100 years ago, where the communists/fascists/socialists-of-the-chair all had remarkably similar ideas about what was to be done despite vehemently and violently disagreeing with one another.
Shrike
8mo ago
If I may –
I suspect (and he can tell me if I am wrong, or unhelpful) is that part of what Hlynka is consistently gesturing towards is that HBD, as a belief, is the sort of belief that a self-anointed ruling class finds helpful because of its Explanatory Power. It is constantly being used to explain why certain government or social programs don't "work."
For the average person this framework is probably not a helpful one compared to something along the lines of the color-blind individualism that I think he is partial to. (Setting aside the fact that good common sense is probably a better predictor than HBD when it comes to keeping one out of trouble, you don't have to believe in HBD to "believe in" FBI crime stats &ct.)
So I think Hlynka's consistent suspicion of people who beat the HBD drum is rooted in the intuition that people who reach for such explanation may be the sorts of people who see themselves as would-be Lords and Masters of humanity, who cannot fail but only be failed. If someone is reaching for HBD, is it because it actually helps them interact with those around them in a charitable and mutually beneficial way or because they're sculpting society inside of their head?
Shrike
8mo ago
I think the actual probable alternative to hormonal contraceptives is just...other contraceptives.
Not that I really think lots of sex and lots of unplanned pregnancies would be the end of the world – I'm fundamentally more of a "babies good" person, and I don't have any particular reason to want people to have abundant sexual access outside of marriage. But, realistically, I imagine that a random draconian ban of hormonal contraceptives tomorrow* would probably result in a slight uptick in babies and a large uptick in alternative methods of birth control. Copper IUDs, for instance, are much more effective than birth control pills, and other more temporary contraceptive methods are relatively reliable.
*to be quite clear, I'm not saying that would be a good idea. But perhaps a less bad idea than genetically modifying women.
Shrike
8mo ago
Wouldn't it just be easier (and less fraught) to decrease the use of hormonal contraceptives? My understanding is that they tend to increase neuroticism and at least for some women decrease libido.
Shrike
9mo ago
I don't think the US Navy has to pay people off to conceal things; that happens routinely. However, I am skeptical that fudging paperwork translates over well into "OK guys we're gonna cover up the deaths of a few hundred people."
Shrike
9mo ago
Ironically sometimes that smoke is itself the product of a conspiracy. For instance, my understanding is that the KGB spread, uh, speculation that the United States created AIDS in a lab.
Shrike
9mo ago
One of the interesting things about MKULTRA is that it was revealed because a small cache of documents survived a document destruction order by the Director of the CIA. It seems to me we can logically infer the possibility (perhaps even the probability) of similarly audacious programs that have been successfully concealed simply because the relevant documents were successfully destroyed.
I agree with your point that government cover-ups can work, and obviously if some can work for some time it implies some can work permanently, or at least still can be working today. But I also think that leaks, frankly, are not that as damaging to the integrity of a cover-up as one might believe.
The problem is that from the outside leaks just look like random baseless rumor. There is a process for laundering such leaks or rumors into consensus reality, often quite literally via the New York Times. The reason Watergate became a scandal was because the leaker respected the process and got the Times on his side. Amusingly, this is also the exact same reason that everyone is talking about UFOs right now: a small group of media-savvy people made a coordinated effort to get it into the Times. I was aware of the "Tic-Tac" incident long before the Times published it (partially via personal connections that alerted me when it "leaked" all the way into a niche publication) but it was not taken seriously by e.g. Congress until it was laundered into mainstream respectability.
You can sort-of map this on to MeToo. My hazy recollection at least was that part of the premise or background of the movement was that there were a number of predatory people, who were known to be predatory (this certainly, at a minimum, seems to be the case for Harvey Weinstein). It was quite literally an open secret that the guy was engaging in harassment at best and outright rape at worst. But until the open secret was laundered into a mainstream narrative Weinstein went unpunished. I am of course fingering the Times as the standard-bearer of this narrative, but I imagine many similar dramas have played out on smaller scales, even within a family.
Another conspiracy I am curious about is the drug-running out of Afghanistan. Rumors have reached me, both online and in-person, that US military aircraft were used to move large amounts of drugs out of Afghanistan during our occupation of the country. (Similar rumors sprung up and were even published regarding the Vietnam war.) I don't know if these rumors are true (I guess I'll believe them when I read them in the Times) but I frankly would be a bit surprised if anyone in the Times was aware of them, and very surprised if they were investigating such a story, even though I imagine they would concede it was possible. I am not sure I can exactly articulate why, but I think everyone has a sense of what I am saying. Somehow it doesn't seem like the sort of thing that should come out now. Perhaps in 20 years, when it will be long too late to change anything that happened.
Which is part of what makes the timing of this lawsuit interesting. It's based on FOIA documents that were extracted from the bowels of the bureaucracy after a few decades. If the allegations are true (and I am not arguing that they are or aren't, I haven't even read the complaint) it seems like a very plausible outcome is a settlement and no jail time for people who negligently killed hundreds of people at random. But then again, that's exactly what happened on Iran Air 655: a settlement was paid, and nobody was disciplined, despite the fact that the missile was fired under verifiably faulty pretenses (I don't think there was a conspiracy here, just a very, very big mistake).
This is a little meandering, so let me come to a point. I think people believe that if there's a "leak," if a single person talks, then somehow magically the truth will out and we'll all read about it in the papers tomorrow. But that's not how these things work. I think it's something like a preference cascade, where the problem isn't what is true and what isn't. Rather, it is a coordination problem. And if the people in charge of the covert endeavor (whether it's Harvey Weinstein and his PR/legal team, or "the CIA," or the people in charge of ensuring that my medical and legal records remain confidential, or what have you) are better at coordinating than the leakers, the leakers can "leak" all they want, but it won't make its way into the collective consciousness whether that's of a single family or an entire nation. Or sometimes, even if it does make its way into the collective consciousness, it can be too awkward to openly acknowledge. You see this at the level of a family or community, but I think sometimes it happens at the national one as well.
I'd propose that when evaluating the plausibly of keeping something secret, then, we shouldn't evaluate the odds of one person blabbing. Rather, we should evaluate the coordination problem at play, and the incentive structures involved. I think that viewing things through this lens has some good explanatory power as to why some covert endeavors fail, some succeed, and many come out several decades later. After many years, the power balance in coordination shifts. Criminal underlings have less of a desire to protect their pals long after the statutes of limitations have expired; victims of abusers accumulate in number, grow in power, and begin to coordinate effectively; people in office lose their allies due to chance and time.
I think a (the?) big elephant in the room with secession is that whichever side successfully cons the other side into jumping first keeps the Presidency for the next 50 years.* Get one of the Big Four states to bail, and suddenly there are 30 - 50 EC votes that your side never needs to worry about again. Now all of a sudden you get a massive leg up in domestic politics and implementing whatever pet domestic agenda you had in mind.
Right now, the echo of Lincoln still rings loudly in our years (the last American Civil War vet died in '56 and the last veteran bride just passed away in 2020). Every single President has been a combination of too much of a true believer in the American project and too much of a realpolitik pragmatist to give away a US state, even if there was internal support for it (there hasn't been.)
Ideologically, I think younger Americans (left and right) are less inclined to have a patriotism or nationalism towards their country as a motherland/fatherland. Some of them might see it merely as a tool to achieve their preferred policy ends (and indeed that's a common attitude towards government these days!) Combine that with an intense focus on maintaining domestic political power, a lack of pragmatic understanding** and a world where there is some native demand for a national divorce and I could see a future where a sitting President goes "besides millions of taxpayers, tens of thousands of servicemen, dozens of vital military installations, four or five different priceless natural resources, and one really nice vacation spot, what have those 40ish Electoral College votes ever done for us?" (Technically this even sort-of happened the first time; the feds did ~zip to stop secession until Lincoln took office.)
I'm not sure such a situation is likely per se, but I think it will be something that will be on the radar in the minds of future politicians in a way that it isn't of most currently serving ones.
An interesting barometer here is Brexit and the Scottish independence question. Obviously Brexit went through, and from what I can tell there's zero English interest in even something relatively mild (like sanctions) if Scotland actually votes to secede. I don't think that this rules out punitive actions or even military action against seceding states, but after a clear referenda I think it is politically trickier.
*In reality I suspect this is a mirage, actually, but a tempting one.
**I'm not actually sure if future governing generations will be worse at pragmatic understanding, to be clear. Certainly many younger people seem less pragmatically-minded, but I'm not sure that's ever been otherwise!
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