fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
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User ID: 2896
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
6mo ago
Would the Ottoman millet system be another example?
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
6mo ago
And thus falls Rome Kabul.
We should have polls here; this would make a great question.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
6mo ago
Thanks!
I didn't realize it had gotten that bad in the last few decades. I'd assumed that the Israeli left had come up with a different vision, but it sounds like they never did?
I'd heard talk about Netanyahu being unpopular and his coalition being shaky, prior to Oct 7, but from what you say it doesn't seem like there's anything coherent that could replace him? It's just "stomp hard" or "stomp harder"... :-(
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
7mo ago
I thought the casting in Hamilton was artistically appropriate. It implicitly compared the modern American black/white divide with the colonial-era American/British divide. Similarly, with the use of rap by the Americans contrasted with the more musical stylings of George III. I've heard that there's even another layer, with different factions of revolutionaries using different styles of rap, but I don't have the ear to tell. And that's not even taking into account Lin-Manuel Miranda being Hispanic. It all contributed to a theme of pitting the vibrant, vigorous, immigrant-fueled multi-cultural melting pot of America against the stagnant, static ancien regime of Britain.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
7mo ago
The Israelis have radicalized and international pressure will radicalize them further still. The Israeli left is crushed utterly. Nobody believes peace is possible short of crushing the enemy now.
Could you go into this in more detail? It might be worth a top-level post.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
7mo ago
Yeah, that sounds familiar. If you happen to come across those links, it'd be nice to have them here for reference, but no worries if not. :-)
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
7mo ago
Yeah, he did that.
There's a whole thing about the City of Seattle and King County selectively not enforcing certain laws (although the City of Seattle has gotten better, while King County is still playing progressive while the city suffers the results). Plus the thing about how a lot of gun control laws primarily target lawful users but ignore the illegal users who actually do most of the killing. I'm libertarian enough that I like having few laws, strictly enforced, and while I have some doubts about the wisdom of the 2nd amendment in the modern world, it - unlike abortion - is in the fucking Constitution until repealed.
But was it that specific event that caused the negative publicity and contributed to the shutdown? I'm curious; I don't know what it looked like to people outside. I was focused on the innumerable local problems, plus recovering from covid and dealing with some other life stuff.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
7mo ago
Maybe Raz did something I'm not aware of, but the reports I heard seemed overblown to me. "Warlord of Capitol Hill" sounded like a catchy phrase that got picked up and tossed around right-wing media, and persisted virally until the end. But maybe that meme contributed to public opinion turning, allowing the shutdown, regardless of whether it was true.
I wasn't down there a lot, but I never felt unsafe because of the large men with guns. It was the opposite, actually: I worried more about the criminals, crazies, addicts, and people currently high, and I thought the presence of the "security" team made it less likely that one of those other people would start something. That's just one person's perspective, of course. But I don't recall hearing about them being involved in the rapes or murders or fencing or drug dealing or whatever else went down.
I do still wonder about extortion, though - there's a liquor store across the street from the police station, right in the heart of the CHAZ/CHOP, and it seemed to survive without visible damage (other than graffiti outside). It's hard to imagine someone there not wanting to shake down the store for free booze, but either they didn't, or it was covered up. I assume the people who run the place wouldn't say anything, because they want to stay safe.
Your OWS story does sound very familiar. The incident that triggered the shutdown of the CHOP was a shooting, that left a black 16-year-old boy dead and a 14-year-old boy wounded. Apparently the kid was from San Diego and had borrowed some money from family the previous Wednesday, to travel north to be part of the protest. Sunday night, he died in a shooting that had some connection to a carjacked SUV, although reports agree that someone else had stolen the SUV and brought it to the CHOP, so last I heard it was still unclear what he and the other kid were doing around it.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
7mo ago
The CHAZ/CHOP in particular had 3 phases, at least to my eye. The first had a lot of influence from the local anarchist community, and had some rhetoric about seceding from the US and suchlike, hence the name "autonomous zone". Then there was some sort of low-key power struggle, possibly just the natural result of all the anarchist-style meetings that were going on, and the BLM faction came out on top, and ditched the more abstract stuff in favor of focusing on police interactions with black people, and changed the name to "occupied protest". Then the police backed off, and there was no resistance, and the normie-lefty contingent kept growing, and it turned into a giant homeless encampment, resembling Hamsterdam from "The Wire" but with smartphones and guns. And then enough people died there that public opinion soured and the mayor felt comfortable shutting it down.
After the first few days, the CHAZ was just where you went if you were a lefty. At first it was the core protestors against the police (the East Precinct substation being right there), but it spread out to people who liked to protest in general, and people who wanted to change something about America's police or America's treatment of black people, and also people who got bored of sitting around in lockdown. I was regularly in the area for other reasons, but one time I think I heard someone talk about "coming down to the protest to see what was happening today".
There didn't need to be a co-ordinator, it just became a Schelling point for every protestor in the city.
I've seen antifa show up to events a couple of times, and I don't doubt that they've got some form of co-ordination, although it might not be very centralized. The earlier riots and looting in Seattle might have had some co-ordination like that, where people passed the word on to friends, and then everyone showed up that evening to a march that rapidly degenerated. But the CHAZ/CHOP thing seemed organic.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
7mo ago
Ken state
The Barbie movie has left a lasting impression on our cultural consciousness.
Horses involved; checks out.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
7mo ago
fairly reasonable(cops wear body cams)
I am all for this. But then when it started to be implemented, BLM's rhetoric turned around, at least locally. The stated rationale was privacy. But cynically, I think it was because too many (but not all!) of their rallying cases wound up having video evidence that contradicted the simple narrative that spun out of the initial reports.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
7mo ago
So how does things look for Israel?
Frankly, I blame Israel, either for failing to discipline the IDF, or for failing at PR. Those videos of Palestinians being shot dead for no apparent reason ought to have been treated like the pictures of naked human pyramids from Abu Ghraib, as a national scandal. Instead, what I've seen is justification via showing worse atrocities committed by Hamas. Maybe I've missed a debunking or something, but for someone who is essentially pro-Israel because they're a modern liberal democracy, this has been extremely disheartening.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
7mo ago
During the BLM protests in 2020+, a lot of ... extremely enthusiastic partisans ... from both sides converged on Portland (OR). It seemed like the cause was President Trump choosing Portland as an example in a speech, which caused people who wanted to fight the good fight (whichever fight it was) to converge on Portland like a Schelling point. I wonder if somehow Columbia has fallen into the same role? The reports of activity on other campuses argue against it, but then, college students and faculty are tied to their location in ways that random street fighters aren't.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
7mo ago
Isn't that similar to how European colonial empires were a net economic drain? And yet there was something, not measured by that economic equation, that made them want a "place in the sun".
Putting aside motivations like pride and competitiveness, there might be something similar to what Paul Graham wrote (I think), about allowing serendipity. Holing up and focusing on specializations may not be the best investment strategy. Maybe there's a place for trying a number of things that aren't likely to work, in case one of them takes off. (What would the world be like if the circa-1600 UK had decided that this "colonization" thing was economically inefficient?) Maybe it's like the social-capital version of an index fund, or hybridization? Possibly the increased scale provides more options in case something somewhere goes wrong, much like an insurance policy?
(There's room for a counter-argument here, about guaranteeing exposure to disease, political instability, and other problems of heterogeneity.)
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
7mo ago
positive-sum
Positive sum in terms of who's system of values? You may have a system that you think everyone should share, but not everyone shares it.
In some other value system, your most positive contribution to the world might involve immediate ritual suicide, to spare the rest of us the effort.
For a less extreme version, someone else's value system might have an axis that does not exist in your system, maybe including such things as "souls" and "afterlives" and suchlike. They might make decisions to de-prioritize improvement in your shared dimensions, in favor of improvements in a dimension that you think is imaginary. (Ritual purity laws might be a good example here.)
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
7mo ago
What is the end-result you believe we are investing in?
I don't see in the thread the result I have found most convincing, so here goes: the end-result is a world where military force is not used to change state borders, and is not sent across state borders in any way that could be ambiguous. Countries can go to hell in their own handbaskets, and descend into civil war and massacre civilians and bleed out endless streams of refugees, but as long as the chaos stays within the lines on the map, the rest of the world can get on with their lives.
Yes, this is hypocritical coming from America (I'm American), but I don't think anyone serious thought that we were going to annex Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere else. If Russia sent troops to (say) Mali as "peacekeepers" or to put down "insurrections" that were causing "human rights violations", whatever. No one serious thinks that the Wagner Group is going to annex the Central African Republic. But if Russia does the same to Ukraine or Georgia or any other neighboring country, that's much more dangerous.
What Russia did in Ukraine - sending tanks and infantry across border in what is objectively an invasion - that seems like the bad old days starting up again. By doing that, Russia made themselves into an enemy, and I am happy to see them bleed. Especially if it has a side-effect of causing NATO to improve its military-industrial capacity. The more damage we can do to Russia, the less likely any other country will be to try something like this in the future. Like China.
Probably the Russians felt the same way about America during Vietnam, and, you know, I'm fine with that. Ditto for anyone who was funding resistance in Afghanistan and Iraq. And yeah, America's messed with a lot of other countries, including Ukraine, in ways that I with my limited knowledge think of as a stupid waste of power. I still think this is different from all of those cases.
And maybe America is too dysfunctional to pull this off. Maybe we can't stop Russia from peeling off its Sudetenland. It's still worth trying. I'm glad we're not going gently into that night.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
7mo ago
I'd look at traditional media coverage. If the coverage is "Iran launched an enormous attack, stretching Israel's defences to their limits", then face is saved and it worked. But if the coverage is "Iran launched a nothingburger attack and Israel laughed at their incompetence", then Iran might need to escalate some more in order to save the proper amount of face.
While I think it's really the 2nd way, if I thought that anyone cared what I thought, I wouldn't go around saying it, and would publicly stick to the 1st way (while in private I'd still probably make this argument). Because I don't want the situation in the Middle East to escalate any more, and in a lot of ways it seems like this sort of limited exchange is good for both the governments of Iran and Israel. Not that I like either of those governments, but I think it might be bad if either collapsed during the current crisis. (I think the sooner Netanyahu is booted from office, the better, but it should be done in a way that reinforces Israel's democracy.)
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
7mo ago
People were talking recently about how Germans tended to obsessively follow laws. Eichmann in Jerusalem points out that, in the 3rd Reich, the Fuhrer's word was law, above any of the written laws. And the result followed logically from those two things.
Here's a few more ideas, not really "classics", but not quite as fluffy as they might seem.
Scott Pilgrim by Bryan Lee O'Malley. You probably already know if you're going to like it. The comic is deeper and more layered than the movie (and show), but still very much the same feel.
Zot! by Scott McCloud. There's collections of the original series, and a sort of encore called Hearts and Minds that I think works best on the web. You can read that first to see if you like it - there aren't any real spoilers.
ElfQuest by Wendy and Richard Pini. I recommend the first 8 books, up through the end of "Kings of the Broken Wheel". After that the quality becomes variable, and I don't remember what's any good, and I haven't read the later stuff. But those first 8 volumes tell a sprawling epic, from cave-men to star travel, and bring it to a good-enough stopping point.
Thieves and Kings by Mark Oakley. It stumbles around just short of being transcendently good, but never quite comes together, at least IMO. But I'm fond of it anyway. There was a decade-long hiatus, but apparently he's started up again.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
7mo ago
Sandman, of course. Nausicaa, The Dark Knight Returns, Kingdom Come, and Red Son are all classics. From Hell might be worth reading, especially if you can find a collected edition with all the notes in the back where he explains his process. Astro City (intermittently ongoing) is a favorite of mine, but some people don't get into it.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
7mo ago
After a few years of heavy coffee abuse, and at times low levels of amphetamines (generic adderall), I no longer get jitters or sleep problems from coffee, no matter how much I drink. There's only a subtle perking up which may be simply be conditioned reflex. Maybe something like this could happen to you, too, although I don't know whether you'd consider that good or bad.
One thing you might try is vigorous exercise after work. In my experience, that tended to drown out any residual effect of caffeine. Although some of the effect may have been the extensive hydration required.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
7mo ago
My mother ran into a problem where her family recipe for cranberry jelly stopped working. After a few years of debugging, and experimenting with things like altitude, it turned out to be the sugar content of the cranberries. Apparently the modern commercial breed has a lot more sugar than the old breeds. I don't know about 50 times, but it was definitely enough to cause pre-20th-century recipes to stop working.
Watermelon rinds have shrunk, too, causing problems for watermelon rind pickle.
And brussel sprouts are no longer as bitter as they used to be.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
7mo ago
There was even a great opportunity for me to have a punch-up with one particular post if I wanted
When I saw that, my first thought was that this seems to be engaging on the wrong level, but my second was to wonder what you'd make of it. I'm still curious, if you're up for a non-argument explanation of what you personally think?
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
7mo ago
He insisted that all of his ideological opponents, whether they be Rationalists, woke progressives, fascists, or anything in between, were all really "the same" underneath
From the perspective of a space alien from another galaxy, all us 4-limbed Earth critters are alike. From my perspective, I barely comprehend why Trotskyist communists disagree with mainline communists, or what the substantive differences between the different Interantionals were. And there's absolutely a strain of conservatism that views all of us here as the spawn of the Enlightenment, and of a particularly virulent offshoot at that. We love defining, categorizing, systematizing, and playing games with Venn diagrams and 4-quadrant memes. We like reasoned and clear argumentation, we want evidence, and objective evidence at that, but all we really get is words words words. And even when we don't care about evidence, we pretend that we do.
We're the type of people who have a bunch of different ethical philosophies, but they all boil down to different varieties of consequentalism, clever hacks to work around the problem that we can't directly comprehend consequences, and so we've called these hacks by a salad of different names. But (and this is just a metaphor) when we encounter someone who's not actually a consequentialist, we don't even have the words to describe what that means, because we've used "non-consequentialist" to refer to other varieties of consequentialism.
He could be pulling this out of his rear, but the shouldn't the Mottely response to that not be to insist on the primacy of our nice little distinctions, but instead to question why he thinks he's so different? Maybe he can't put that in words, in a way that we can understand. Maybe we can't parse his binary blob*, but at least we can stick a wrapper around it and say "this dude has a Thing about politics that we don't understand". And maybe some of us conclude that there's no "there" there, that he's failed at constructing a perfectly rational system of the world from the bottom up, and that his views are fundamentally incoherent. But wasn't part of the problem that we don't want people claiming that they know what's going on in other people's heads, and ascribing views to the other people that the other people explicitly disclaim?
- Yeah, yeah, "ATM machine".
I've thought for a while that partisan infighting is the true opiate of the masses. But not in the sense that it makes us happy and relaxed.
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