Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4hr ago
I don't think it's a problem that we keep coming up with new stuff for people to do (I think we will probably see more and more people employed doing things we previously would have regarded as too frivolous to professionalize).
My point is more that administrivia is somewhat self-perpetuating. Partly this is a function of Jevon's Paradox - as we get more efficient at doing paperwork, one of the biggest results is more paperwork. We now control and track and analyze stuff that would have been impractical to the point of impossibility 50 years ago. Contra some of my other respondents, I don't actually think that this work is useless (otherwise they'd get squeezed out by employers looking to cut costs), but I think it is unlikely to go away without a deliberate effort because it also a function of our prevailing employment paradigm.
Having mulled it over, Jevon's Paradox is probably the wrong conceptual reference. For the foreseeable future, you still need humans to do some stuff. This is real, valuable work, but it may not actually take up most of their time (especially if AI actually delivers on productivity improvements). However, their employer still expects them to be available full time, which means they expect to be paid full-time, which means their employer expects them work full time*, which means creating busywork. Sometimes this is merely stuff of marginal value, sometimes it is outright time wasting. Either way, getting rid of this institutional waste heat and shifting to a genuinely fully automated process would require that you both be able to fully replace human activity with machine activity (not simply augment it) and to step outside of how we currently organize work.
*Also the employees generally want full time employment and prefer employers who offer it
Unfortunately, busywork is also subject to Jevon's Paradox.
Building a fully automated economy is going to require conscious effort to build systems that reduce/eliminate human participation. Otherwise the meatbags will just keep making more work for each other.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1d ago
The problem I have with failure-to-deter and other sins of inaction is that unless you're withdrawing some active intervention they're overdetermined. Obama could have done more to oppose Russia post-2013/4, but so could most of Europe. The sheer indifference of most European allies colored the US' own response.
Specifically regarding failures of deterrence, it is not clear to me what critics of Obama expected him to have done other than something really outside like cooperate in suppressing the Maidan protests.
Frankly, the flip from that to Russia-gate makes me take the left's positions on international relations as deeply un-serious.
I don't think this follows. Obama's dismissiveness of Russia as a source of problems in 2012 has certainly aged poorly, but at the time the US was trying to switch focus from Europe and the Middle East to Asia-Pacific and China (it is still trying to do this) and the broad consensus was that Russia was a gas station with nukes. The flip on Russia was a direct response to Russia doing things. You should expect people to update
Although the other side seems to have never met a proposed intervention they didn't like, which is its own failure mode.
The reason why right-wing anti-interventionism will never have any legs is that the right-wing elite is full of people who fundamentally believe in the crude application of force to achieve positive results and the right-wing base is full of people who think you have a moral obligation to support the team no matter what. The result is that right-wing elites constantly try to fix problems with violence and their supporters always back them because it is practically unthinkable not to.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2d ago
He paid hundreds of thousands of crisis actors to fake colossal pro-EU protests in Ukraine, forcing Russia to invade eastern Ukraine to... do something.
"Obama/the US caused the Russo-Ukrainian War" rests on the claim that the Maidan protests were an American op.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5d ago
The central examples of fascist regimes we have (Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy) both made ideological fealty mandatory and were extremely interested in regulating the lives of their subjects.
The distinction there is not fascist vs communism but totalitarian vs authoritarian. Authoritarian regimes are often satisfied with mere obedience, and may actively try to depoliticize the population at large. Authoritarian countries tend to have a weak, withered civil society. Totalitarian countries, by contrast, have a powerful civil society that has been annexed by the state.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8d ago
Is ressentiment a good model here? As I understand it, the basic idea of ressentiment is, essentially, moral cope. Being unable to live up to your society's virtues, you redefine virtue to reflect the traits you already have (or are at least reasonably capable of attaining). I'm not going to say it describes nobody, but I don't think it describes the prevailing splits in American politics. Those are, I think, mostly about substantive and long-running values disagreements, and those disagreements are not explained by ressentiment.
Right-wing populists aren't abandoning left-wing values they cannot attain; they are rejecting standards they never supported. There's definitely a powerful element of resentment - a feeling that they are denied the status and respect to which they are properly entitled - but that is not the same thing. Not dissimilarly, I think the upswing in left-wing populism is directly traceable to anger over perceived moral hypocrisy and systemic economic failures rather than some tension between their understanding of conventional virtues and what they themselves can achieve.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11d ago
All the conservative Chicagoland women are in the collar counties and don't use dating apps.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
12d ago
I didn't say that they were. It is merely that the South is where efforts to disenfranchise black voters have been most vigorously pursued. And in case it's not clear, I think the suggestion that persistent efforts to disenfranchise black voters have transitioned seamlessly from white supremacist to merely partisan motives should be viewed as totally laughable with extreme skepticism.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
12d ago
The average Black Southerner cares very little for many Democratic-aligned social endeavors, for example, but not to an extent that they'll vote against them, either.
What is your point? Not agreeing with all of the political goals of candidates they support is not a distinctive feature of black voters (e.g. not all Republican voters are anti-LGBT, but they still support anti-LGBT politicians).
A question of interest might be why the GOP is so incredibly bad at capturing these socially conservative black voters. They're certainly capable of getting votes from extremely poor, socially conservative white voters, often despite openly promising policies detrimental to their welfare. I put it to you that there a significant faction in American politics that is hostile to black civil rights, that post-CRM these people concentrated in the Republican Party, and that black voters are acutely aware of this. The result is that even though there are a lot of socially conservative black voters and even though poor social conservatives may prioritize their social beliefs over economic interests, the GOP does extraordinarily poorly with black voters.
there's also been the parallel and ongoing project demonizing any creation of white shared interests as such.
If you are talking purely about progressive spaces, I find it hard to deny this, but I also find it hard to escape the conclusion that this is because basically every attempt to construct a shared white interest group has been unsubtle white supremacism/white nationalism. Black identity, by contrast, is largely an outside imposition, and by and large black political organization has been organized around civil rights issue; there is no comparable set of issues for white voters.
If you are talking about the full American political spectrum, no. Virtually every conservative space is extremely skeptical of the idea that racism against minorities is a live issue (unless they can find a way to blame the liberals, who are the real racists) while being very receptive to the idea that white people (and particularly white men) are being systematically disadvantaged.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
12d ago
Did it?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
12d ago
Why are France and Britain a problem? The transition from 4th to 5th Republic was not a violent revolution; discounting the period of foreign occupation during WW2, France has had a democratic government continuously since 1870. Britain's separatist rebellions came out of disenfranchised subject territories; as well say the US has a discontinuity because it no longer owns the Philippines.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
13d ago
What does "overpowered" mean? Populous states explicitly punch below their weight relative to their actual proportion of the electorate in all federal elections. The US already has a number of countermajoritarian and outright minoritarian institutions, and the argument is that actually we need the federal government to be less representative?
Electorally I think it’s past time to allow each congressional and senatorial district to issue its own electors. State by state winner takes all overpowers the large states too much in national policy.
Why not just have a direct popular vote for President? Or abolish the Presidency and have Congress select the chief executive?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
13d ago
That doesn't answer the question of why Southern black voters are so strongly aligned with the Democratic Party. Or why Southern white voters are so strongly aligned with the Republican Party - e.g. in 2023 Brandon Presely got 22% of the white vote in MS, which was an exceptionally good performance (Biden got 17% in 2020 and Obama got even less in 2012).
(It must also be noted that the Deep South has a large rural black population - appealing to rural/urban splits doesn't resolve the problem)
Anti-black racism is sui generis in the United States, especially in the South. Racism, xenophobia, and other forms of bigotry generally push minorities left, but this is, for the most part, garden variety discrimination that you find everywhere to some degree. It wasn't that long ago that ~1/3rd of the US was run by explicit white supremacists and rendered black Americans explicitly second-class citizens (on top of a raft of informal but no less severe forms of discrimination). One of the consequences of prolonged, intensive discrimination was to forge African-Americans into a much more cohesive, organized identity group than pretty much anyone else.
By contrast, "White", "Hispanic", or "Asian" are much more weakly operational groups containing subsets that do not see themselves as having shared interests, e.g. you could probably justify dividing white voters regionally and Hispanic/Asian voters by country of ancestral origin.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
13d ago
Why are Southern black voters so uniformly aligned with the Democratic Party? Did something happen? I was led to understand that race relations in the South were actually great and reports of interracial discord were Yankee propaganda.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
13d ago
America's "grand buildings" are skyscrapers. We crank out wonders with such regularity it has become pedestrian and people mostly complain that they're blocking the view.
These old world structures are mostly either religious monuments (of which there are plenty in the US, but lacking the inherent cachet of older construction) or the vanity projects of aristocrats. For the democracies, if you're going to spend 10% of the budget on a decades long project, there's mostly an expectation that it will serve the public (or at least national) interest rather than fluffing the king's ego.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
15d ago
Sorry, we'll just keep calling them ICE, even (especially) when they're actually Bortac or something.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
15d ago
The more important difference between J6 and the typical political assassination attempt is that Jan 6th was organised by the institutional GOP and various other organised right-wing groups
This is what I meant by "indicting yourself" - to try and pass of J6 as the act of crazy people entails conceding that Trumpism is institutionally deranged. Since Trump supporters don't generally believe that, the "I can't be held responsible for nominally affiliated lunatics whose ideas I definitely don't share" defense gets put aside in favor of a medley of "no big deal" + "provocateurs" + "actually justified" (which may not be particularly convincing from a logical perspective but provides supporters a variety of escape hatches).
By contrast, lone wolf terrorists may be following some piece of political rhetoric to its logical conclusion, but people can pretty easily justify disavowing them because rhetoric, however incendiary, usually stops short of saying "go forth and kill."
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
15d ago
It did happen. I am contrasting it with a failed presidential assassination attempt, which aren't even all that uncommon.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
15d ago
In the US, you're not white if you have any noticeable non-European ancestry. Like, Obama is technically biracial (white mother, black father), but basically everyone considers him to be black.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
15d ago
Harming Patel is counterproductive if you're trying to undermine the Trump administration.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
15d ago
He ran the first half of the marathon in 1:00:29, and the second half in 59:01
Obviously these guys are elite athletes and I am a pretty slow runner, but I find it hilarious and impressive that they can run a half twice as fast as me. And then, while I am out of commission for a day or two, they immediately do it again, but faster.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
15d ago
I have a prediction: no one will care. The right tried and failed to do this with Charlie Kirk and there they had an actual body. It's just not that easy to rile people up over something that didn't happen.
I have a further prediction: the Trump scandal train has no breaks, so within a week this will be overtaken/displaced by some new headline about corruption or war with Iran heating up again or Border Patrol murdering some more people or one of a hundred other topics.
Why would you hand him a narrative victory?
Coordinating 70 million people is hard.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
16d ago
because it can't simply be "oh that guy was nuts, but I'm not that guy so it doesn't impact me or my beliefs"
"That guy was nuts, doesn't count" is the pretty standard right-wing defense when confronted with right wing political violence. It only really becomes a problem when there's some reason you can't write off the perpetrator as crazy, e.g. J6 stands out because you can't argue thousands of Trump supporters are all crazy without indicting yourself.
Is being a police officer a bullshit job? Professional law enforcement is an occupation that only exists because of legislation creating it.
Graeber would say yes, though that's because he thinks any kind of security work is BS; he also thinks actuaries and corporate attorneys and executive assistants are all bullshit jobs. Conversely, he'd probably think food safety inspector was a real job. This is because "bullshit job" is an incoherent concept that people slap on jobs they think shouldn't exist. They have a variety of reasons why they might think a job shouldn't exist, but they're almost always normative claims about what things are worth doing.
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