barristan_selmy
No bio...
User ID: 2094
barristan_selmy
8d ago
Sorry, I was using "NCD" as the common shorthand for /r/NonCredibleDefense (and the Motte created the link automatically for me). If it makes a difference, you will probably remain a better person if you never visit this particular subreddit anyhow.
barristan_selmy
8d ago
Deliberately ruining our economy so we become desperate and capitulate willingly? Maybe. But my point is he doesn't need to, we're doing it ourselves and he just needs to wait a few years.
barristan_selmy
8d ago
FTFY
barristan_selmy
8d ago
I took it as a strawman because the term experts was doing a lot of heavy lifting. I think you may have better characterized the correct criticisms of the post.
I have no skin in the particular game of that top-level post and not much to contribute to the discussion, but I reserve my right to criticize. On the subject of effort posts, I hope you will instead visit my recent top level post in Transnational Thursday though!
Fun hypotheticals, complicated feelings, and harsh realities about a war with Canada, from a Canadian point of view
(for the purposes of this rant, "us/we" = Canadians and "you" = Americans)
I've seen lots of bluster and jingoism on our side of the border from politicians, the news media, and my former colleagues in the Canadian military about a hypothetical trade war/actual war with the US. Just because we're dealing with a bunch of nonsense from south of the border, doesn't mean we shouldn't talk about this rationally or delude ourselves about our actual position.
(1) Almost none of us should take the threats seriously. Bullying Canada (or Greenland, or Panama, or whatever but especially Canada) is just going to tank your own economy and food supply, as well as alienate the whole Western world and torpedo your whole project of world peace and economic dominance under a rules-based order. No one wins here except China and Russia. We Canadians should just chalk up all this talk to being just negotiation tactics.
(2) Okay that being said, second off, the Canadian military should and will actually take the threats seriously. An American invasion is just never, never going to happen... but if it does make no mistake, we will fight you, no matter how hopeless. For folks in the military, it's just the nature of the job. I myself would be among the first to rejoin so I can pick up a rifle and shoot back.
(3) We do not have much of a chance of "winning" a war with you, or even slowing you down all too much. The reason being, as every serving and former member of the CAF knows, we have neglected our military and our NATO commitments for decades. Folks will point to our history of making do with little at the outset of a war, and building ourselves up into a fearsome fighting force that punches above our weight. That's garbage talk. We'd be fighting you alone, with very little time to prepare, and inferior numbers and firepower in every way. The best we can do is be unruly subjects and resist an occupation after the fact.
(4) No one in the Canadian or American military wants this fight. Memes like this (currently top on r/NCD) pretty much sum it up. But an actual invasion would quickly harden our resolve against you, much like Ukraine, and I almost guarantee that the first 1,000 casualties will be American and happen in the days before you realize that yes, the Canadians are willing to shoot back at invaders.
(5) Although we will not join you willingly at the present moment (about 90% of Canadians do not want to join the US according to recent polls), Trump has touched on a nerve when he says the opposite. The fact is, after a decade of economic mismanagement, ruinous immigration policy, and rule by the current political/media class, we have very little left to be proud of as Canadians, and much to be envious of when we look at the how the US economy is doing. As such, the inconceivable has now become conceivable in that, if we were to continue down this path for another five or so years, I can see a future world where the majority of Canadians would rather become American than suffer their continued decline of quality-of-life.
(6) Trump is right to be upset. Those us who are able to put down ideology and jingoism and use our brains for a second are sympathetic. Canada has been a shitty ally and trading partner for decades now, and especially in the last decade.
(a) Despite being your largest trading partner, we subsidize our own industry to billions of dollars a year, then dump product on you and hope you will see it as benign enough to let the con go on for another year. At the same time, we are protective of our own shitty, low-productivity, low-growth industries and don't even let American companies enter key markets. Not that anyone wants to do business in Canada anymore anyways.
(b) Our security policy has been to "phone the US" if we ever get in trouble. We don't even have air defense assets. We have two entire working diesel submarines at any given time to patrol three oceans. As mentioned above, we have no effective military or deterrence capability.
(c) We let Chinese nationals who are easily compromised by the CCP infiltrate into high-ranking positions in our government, universities, and industry to spy on us and interfere with our policy. We let partially state-owned Chinese companies buy up our strategic resources. We let spies from the "near-Arctic" state cruise around the Northwest Passageway and scout out our (few) military installations.
(d) We let legitimate refugees and phony "asylum seekers" in by the millions, just so many of them can risk their lives trying to cross into the US the next month. For many Canadians, seeing the sheer numbers of people trying to cross into the US has been the wake-up call we needed.
(e) Our Five Eyes intelligence partners don't even tell us anything important because they don't trust us. Heck every couple of years, your intelligence agencies seem to uncover a plot against Americans being planned on our soil. And what do they do? They skip the official federal channels and just phone up the local police or RCMP, who can actually be trusted to do their jobs.
(7) We are entirely beholden to you for our economy and security. Despite a lot of talk generated the last time around that Trump was poking at us, we have done nothing to diversify the customer base of key exports such as crude. Although at the same time, you are fairly beholden to us for things such as electricity, potash, and uranium. So in a trade war, you lose some, but we lose everything.
(8) In the face of all this, our leadership at the highest level has responded by folding. But instead of just resigning and letting an immediate election happen, our PM has prorogued Parliament, nakedly to buy time for his party to regroup, meaning that we have no actual functioning government for the next two months and he stays in charge nominally, with no credibility to actually negotiate on our behalf. On the flip side, neither do you really... Trump and team are currently ruling by news conference and Twitter while your actual government sits by. I really hope Pierre Pollievre sees this as an opportunity to assemble his team and do the same.
(9) In light of all of the above, Trump's threat of annexing us by economic force deserves to be taken more seriously. What does that look like? I don't think Canadians will accept a hostile annexation into political union. It is more likely to be a "soft" annexation. I can easily see a world where you guys dictate a lot more of our economic policy, security policy, and foreign relations. Trump has already influenced our border and immigration policy in a big way.
(10) Now, for some speculation. What does Trump's team want from all this? Like good negotiators, I think they have been holding out on their true objective here. But once it's said out loud, it's going to look fairly obvious. Canada, Greenland, and Panama. What do all these places have in common? Control of key waterways for home security and projection of US Naval power. It's about the Northwest Passage, dummy! All you guys want is to run the Arctic, so you can keep the Chinese and the Russians out and profit from future Arctic trade routes. If this happens, the fact that we lost control and sovereignty over our portion of the Arctic will go down as a national embarrassment and historic tragedy, somewhere on par with our chronic inability to manage our oil wealth.
If I could sum up my rant, this whole affair is embarrassing as a Canadian. There really is a feeling that pervades every aspect of our lives right now that the chickens are coming home to roost after so many years of mismanagement and neglect by successive governments (especially, but not only by, the Liberals). Although the great majority are blinded by national pride and not willing to admit it, we've got a losing hand here and Trump & co have some legitimate grievances. So all in all, whether it's the Arctic or something else that you guys actually want, things are not boding well for us holding onto our current status in the world.
barristan_selmy
9d ago
I’m pretty empathetic to the job the mods have to do and won’t defend user antifa, but I tend to agree strongly with what you have to say here. For a place that claims to optimize for “light, not heat”, things such feel like an echo chamber in here too often.
I also don’t think it’s a problem that can be solved by any level of moderation. For example, this post from last week’s Culture War thread felt like the kind of low-effort strawman I am used to seeing on Twitter, yet it received a lot of upvotes and was not criticized by other users.
I think we should do more to hold ourselves accountable to a higher standard of discussion, no matter what political slant is being invoked. Mods can only referee here, they can’t make the plays.
barristan_selmy
6mo ago
Lots of weird looks but it hasn't happened yet!
barristan_selmy
6mo ago
Maybe I'm going on a tangent to your interesting culture war anecdote, but since you touched on it, there is a problem that has been bugging me lately: is there any way we as a society can discourage our best and brightest from going into rent-seeking professions?
I used to be a quant trader. I left because I was bothered by the pervading sense that what we were doing created nothing of value for society or the world, and by the moral decay it seemed to create in the environments I was working in.
Almost by definition, quant trading will never generate any significant positive externalities for anyone, since most of what you are doing is seeking to exploit temporary inefficiencies. And it generates a significant negative externality by draining talent and capital that could otherwise be employed productively.
So why don't we ban quant/algorithmic trading? Or regulate and tax it heavily? This is what governments usually try to do when an industry is generating negative externalities.
I can make a few good arguments not to ban it outright:
- There are well-known benefits to having stable, liquid capital markets in terms of attracting investment to an economy.
- The markets for capital and labour should be efficient, as long as we ensure competition in the industry. Sooner or later, these salaries should come down to Earth and the talent will go someone it's needed more.
- All of the negative consequences of quant trading seem to be higher-order impacts. There's no immediate, visible negative consequences produced from this activity, like say, tailing ponds or child amputations.
- It's difficult to even define what it is exactly. When is it "quantitative" or "algorithmic" vs. "fundamental" or "gut-based" (and are the right-hand terms even more virtuous somehow?)? Maybe you just want to ban noise trading or scalping, but even those could be difficult to differentiate those from other activities such as market-making or longer-term investing.
A lot of the same considerations apply to other lucrative bullshit industries that are currently sucking up talent such as cryptocurrencies, internet advertising, social media, or video games. I think these are all terrible things and if it were between having them or not, the world would be better off without them, unquestionably. But I don't think it's a good idea to ban them, and politically, this is never going to happen.
Taxing these industries could be more practical. A well-considered tax could offset some of the negative externalities and shrink the number of seats available, forcing many would-be quant traders or social media engineers to venture out into the productive part of the economy instead. But there are still practical and political considerations that will prevent this from happening in our world.
So what else can be done? Since the government isn't going to do much to fix things, maybe the solution lies with individuals instead. As in, what would make me our best and brightest go against financial incentives and actively choose not to be quant traders?
To imagine what this solution might be, we can look at the petroleum industry. Years ago, many of our best and brightest engineers used to flock to oil & gas. Dating myself a bit, but when I went to school, chemical engineering was known to be a lucrative option. But then in the last decade or so, besides a correction to the price of oil, working in oil & gas became possibly literally the least cool thing you could do. The younger generations have experienced a major moral awakening, and decided that they wanted to be on the right side of history when it comes to the climate crisis.
Could finance have its moment like this as well? Certainly, back in 2010/2011 it looked possible with the Occupy movement. And of course, anti-capitalist sentiment amongst youth has been rising lately, especially ever since they got their hands on TikTok (what a strange coincidence). I would never rule out change due to negative backlash from an economically alienated, ill-informed mob.
But what I would really like to see is a positive change in the mindset of the elite itself. As someone who is arguably part of this elite, I would put forth the following ethical argument:
- The world has very pressing issues that we need social, cultural, political, and technological solutions for.
- These issues require members of the elite to devote themselves to solving them. Most non-members of the elite will not be able to do so, since they are just scraping out an economic existence as it is.
- Therefore, as the intellectual elite, we have a moral responsibility to solve these issues for the benefit of all (elite and non-elite).
To me, this is the core of a belief system, or possibly even a religion. Speaking as an atheist, I think maybe at least part of the reason that these industries exist in their current form and the world is so screwed up today in our post-modern areligious world is that we've lost a bit of the moral anchor that religion used to provide us. So maybe what it takes to save us is actually a new kind of religion.
barristan_selmy
6mo ago
I bought a 22 lb weighted vest/plate carrier. Really great for running and rucking, and most fun of all: it adds a layer of immersion to the mil-sim shooter I play on the Quest and turns my gaming sessions into nice workouts.
barristan_selmy
7mo ago
I think this situation can be more fairly characterized as a crisis for the current government and balance of power in Parliament than a full-blown constitutional crisis, unless we are speculating about the second- and third-order effects for trust in institutions, separatist sentiments, or populist sentiments on the left/right.
What should hopefully come to pass is that the facts will come out, names will be named, and it will become clear that the Liberals have their hands dirtiest all the way up to the level of the PMO (side remark: the PM himself may not be directly implicated, since if you have been listening to him lately, he doesn’t read his briefs or keep close tabs on anything his advisors are up to). Once that happens, we would hope for a criminal investigation and a swift vote of non-confidence, not necessarily in that order, leading to a change in the party in power.
The real confounder here is how much the Tories and especially the NDP have their hands dirty as well. If the other parties are as complicit as the Liberals, they might be able to keep the current balance of power in place for another year through collusion, at enormous cost to the relationship between the Canadian People and our most hallowed institution of “Good Government”. But that would only postpone the inevitable electoral judgement day.
A preview of the next 6-18 months.
barristan_selmy
9mo ago
These buy-side quant jobs are the best-paying jobs you can get as a pure shape-rotator who sucks at office politics
Bravo, you just perfectly described the theory of my early career and the careers of several other quants I know. Source: am a recovering quant.
barristan_selmy
10mo ago
Google recently agreed to pay the "link tax" and play ball, despite my initial hope that they would fight it more. So it's looks more likely now that they will continue to play ball. Kind of unfortunate in my view, since I think that an abrupt end to social media services operating in Canada would be an unintentional and extremely positive outcome from this whole thing.
barristan_selmy
10mo ago
In practice these bills have enabled far leftist authoritarianism and hate speech, by censoring valid opposition
Too much "bothsidesism" is not in itself an accurate assessment of reality
Thanks, I don't really disagree. But as explained in reply to another commenter, I think it's important to steelman the issue a bit and try to argue from a politically neutral perspective to explore how this issue can be argued effectively with progressives as well as conservatives. The reality as we know is that this bill has partisan objectives and I think everyone reading my post here is capable of filling in the blanks with their own experience of the actual political reality in 2024.
barristan_selmy
10mo ago
The Conservatives are leading the Liberals 42 - 24 in national polls
Pierre Pollievre's only objection so far seems to be that it creates too much "bureaucracy". I would guess that the average Tory voter is still easily swayed by moral panic "it's for the children's safety" type arguments. But this is already his solid base, and I think there's a failure of imagination going on in terms of what could be gained by taking a stand here.
So Canadian news media is in a spot where if they do their job they are likely to go bankrupt after the next election.
A cynical interpretation of course is that they are doing this for the same reason they are funding the CBC so well. Also a bit of cronyism perhaps given that our Deputy PM made her bones in the newsroom at the Globe and Mail.
barristan_selmy
10mo ago
This is progressive-speak for "misgendering", interpreted as such by every court and tribunal, and you know that
I don't know that. Can you please elaborate?
I have been deliberately avoiding discussing this bill from a strict culture war perspective and instead trying to steelman it a bit from a "is this good for democracy" perspective. Of course, every one of these provisions is open to being interpreted from a leftist political slant and yes, we all know that's exactly what this current government intends to do.
barristan_selmy
10mo ago
Bill C-63 (Online Harms Act)
For those who aren't following, Canada's Liberal government last month tabled a sweeping new bill targeted at regulating speech on social media. The bill lays out seven regulated categories of speech:
- Content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor
- Intimate content communicated without consent
- Content used to bully a child
- Inducing a child to harm themselves
- Hate speech
- Inciting violence
- Inciting violent extremism or terrorism
To enforce these restrictions, the bill establishes a set of new appointed government entities in order to enforce compliance with these rules by social media companies, with penalties running up to 6% of global revenue. In addition, it empowers Human Rights Tribunals to investigate complaints by individuals against other individuals and levee fines of up to $20,000.
Perhaps the most shocking thing about the public discourse around this bill has been... the lack of public discourse around this bill. What the hell has happened to us?
Maybe this is the inevitable end game of the gradually hollowing out of the Fifth Estate that has been happening all these years, including by the government itself who has been gradually buying themselves a loyal Ministry of Information through their steady funding increases to the CBC all these years. Maybe it's the disastrous result of a generation entering the body politic that has been steadily brainwashed by the ideologues running our school system, no longer able to form thoughts on their own or engage with the world for more than six seconds owing to a constant addiction to digital stimulation, building the world in their own small-minded safetyist self-image.
Or is it that despite what we promised ourselves never to do, we have finally let 9/11 age out of our collective memory? I for one remember a time not so long ago when the word "government" in Western countries conjured up associations with shady business interests, massive dragnet surveillance, imperialist wars for oil and geopolitical hegemony, extrajudicial black sites, and general suspicion and persecution of Muslims. It was the Big Bad Neocons who were trying to take over the world and police your thoughts. If our government at the time had tried to police online speech and set up a system of kangaroo courts in order to prevent "harms", our media would have been up in arms and many of us would have taken to the streets to protest. Yes, it was cool and righteous to be anti-government.
Now our government says only "extreme" online hate speech would be subject to the rules, and that despite the powers that the legislation grants in theory, they will behave with restraint. And are we really going to believe this, this time around? This is the same government and the same PM who labeled the entire trucker protest movement as Nazis, for the reason that someone used a swastika flag in order to call him a Nazi, and who subsequently imposed emergency powers to crush them.
And what about when the worm turns, and the next moral panic and/or government comes around? Will they persecute Trudeau in the courts for perpetuating hate through his use of blackface? From a cosmic justice perspective this is surely a satisfying outcome, but it's a lamentable world where our political process has degenerated into a saga of political gangsterism where the ingroup and outgroup each take turns exacting revenge on each other. This is definitely the direction we're headed in.
Of course, if you wanted the ridiculousness of the whole thing to be self-evident, you would be hard pressed to pick a better time to introduce the bill than right now. 25 years for "inciting genocide"? In a time when the word genocide is being thrown about wantonly by both Israel and Palestine supporters as the accusation du jour, no one knows exactly what inciting genocide means, except that you can get 25 years for doing it on social media when Albert Speer got only 20 years for his role in architecting a system of literal concentration camp slave labour.
I've got to hand it to the government though, because when you look at who will bear the burden of actually policing social media day-to-day, they have sidestepped the real responsibility. No, it's the social media companies themselves that will determine what does and doesn't constitute hate speech, inciting genocide, bullying a child, whatever. Failure to comply is not an option, because they can be fined up to 6% of their global revenue. Assuming they decide to continue operating in Canada, I have no doubt that given the choice between trying to toe the line and interpret the rules reasonably, and dialing up their content filters to 11, they will choose to play it safe and do the latter. As the late Charlie Munger advised us: never underestimate the power of incentives, which of course we will because we're a nation that seems to do so repeatedly and pathologically at every turn.
Now all that being said, I have avoided the seemingly mandatory disclosure by commenters on this particular issue that there are parts of this law that I'm in favour of (less anyone accuse me of being against protecting children from sexual victimization). I am generally in favour of criminalizing suicide encouragement towards a child, and revenge porn, as long as these trangressions are held to the same level of scrutiny as say, uttering death threats, and are tried to high standards in a criminal court. As I've explored a bit, hate speech, inciting violence, and inciting violent extremism or terrorism are all going to be far too open to interpretation and used to suppress political debate and dissent. As for "content used to bully a child", I don't even think I have to go into just how vague that is or how likely it is to lead to an overwhelming flood of investigations and complaints, and I don't believe that we even should reasonably attempt to protect other people's children from most forms of bullying. So there's the nuance of my position.
In the end, what we will end up with if this bill passes will be a bland, claustrophobic version of the internet where political discussion is restricted to the point that we can barely talk about the weather, and so we just spend all our time online shopping and looking at pictures of food. And for all our political apathy in this county, it might be exactly what we deserve.
barristan_selmy
1yr ago
Can TikTok do the same? Can it just turn down the dials on a soldier, make him less effective? I don't know.
According to a Canadian army officer I know, yes. He took a course during the post-Afghanistan years that was supposed to teach “strategic thinking”. One of their case studies was a problem that the US military faced: amid high unemployment in places like Karachi, Pakistani youths with nothing better to do were being recruited by the Taliban and crossing the mountainous border regions to kill American soldiers. How to solve this?
The obvious and favored course of action was to apply airpower and bomb the heck out of suspected tunnel areas and waypoints in the mountains with B52s. Cost: on the order of $100m - $1b. However, an alternative course of action that was considered took a PSYOPS angle: buy a few hundred generators and a few thousand Xboxes and set up free gaming centers around Karachi. The theory being, by distracting the youth with video games, they would be less likely to seek adventure and meaning by joining up with the Taliban. Cost: on the order of $1m - $10m.
The leadership at the time chose the former course of action. But several years later, the latter course of action is being studied by aspiring senior officers as a brilliant example of innovative and strategic thinking that could have saved a portion of the trouble of fighting a war.
barristan_selmy
2yr ago
Not over the course of the last year, but I went through a personal experience with abortion that has changed my feelings. I have always leaned heavily pro-choice since I see the value of human life as something that basically starts from zero and accumulates over time as we develop. Any other position is extreme, the only room for uncertainty is in drawing the line of when a life is valuable enough to protect against the potential harm of bringing a child into the world who is unwelcome, un-cared for, or has some condition that makes them unequipped to lead a good life. And as I see it, the potential for suffering is low for an embryo or an early fetus that has a brain significantly less developed than a newborn baby. So I would have said, go ahead, abort as many as you like! As long as it’s the first trimester. Plenty of valid reasons to abort well into the second trimester as well, but at that point I would not allow it just for poor planning or inconvenience. Lastly, it’s important that women have good access to abortion to prevent the societal harms of unwanted pregnancies.
Then, at the age of 24, my girlfriend and I got pregnant. We caught it a bit late at six weeks. It came as a real surprise because she was on the pill, it turned out later there was a recall on her medication. But we figured we weren’t ready, so the very next day after we found out we headed into the clinic.
At the clinic it turned out she was carrying twins. That made it a lot harder, for some reason, maybe because it felt special and unlikely to happen that way again if we decided to have kids later. But we still went through with it.
The reality of going through an abortion is it’s a highly unpleasant experience. No matter how much you attempt to detach from it, you will still find yourself emotionally attached to this thing that you created, as if it was another part of you. I felt, and still feel deeply ashamed about the whole thing. Not because of societal pressure or stigma or anything like that, but because fundamentally I killed my unborn children.
I am still pro-choice and my views around timing and access to abortion have not changed, but I now think it is not a decision to be taken lightly and there are valid reasons to be hesitant to have an abortion. I am far more sympathetic now to doctors who refuse to perform or condone abortions as well (it’s also explicitly forbidden under the Hippocratic Oath). And paradoxically, I have a lot less sympathy to those who attempt to interfere with couples seeking abortions and the doctors facilitating that process. It’s extremely difficult to make that decision and carry through with it, and any barrier to access could lead to an outcome they will regret for the rest of their lives.
Tell that to the WTO. Yes, the US does it too to some extent.
According to Wikipedia, the status of the Northwest Passage is disputed (mostly by the US). Seems we could assert a lot more control over the Northwest Passage if we put the resources into it, I'm mourning that we don't do this.
Yes but this is veering into semantics. With the legislative branch handcuffed and with a lame duck executive, no one is steering the ship at the federal level.
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