jake
10d ago
The US would never implement such a policy, not without an effective or actual revolution in governance. The brutal pragmatism wouldn't stop at "Good luck with that," it would be a fully isolationist US or West. We're talking a mined, milecastled and turreted border wall with Mexico with no entrances, boats flying unacceptable or no flags being sunk, no flights to those countries, no business in those countries, no telecommunications access permitted from those countries. We're talking skin color as a reason for detainment and summary deportation. It's a nightmare scenario.
The position was hyperbole in service of my conclusion: we do have an ultimate obligation to help these countries but what we're doing right now is hurting them. Hurting them so much threatening them with drone strikes would be superior than our "aid." It's not charity to think of every human as a blank slate, it's confusing what ought to be for what is, and profound differences in human behavior is what is. Just health differences, that our discourse has devolved so far that in another environment I might have to heavily couch myself to avoid the impression of wrongthink when all I'm wondering about is a genetic propensity to PPH, this isn't right, good, truthful. Now instead we're in decades of a geopolitical implementation of the trope of the pageant girl's vapid "I'm going to work for world peace." Charity must be tailored to the target, it must be undertaken with knowledge of the recipient's strengths and shortcomings, all of them. In other words, it must be undertaken out of actual love. John Green wants to show love, he grew up Christian in whatever surely protestant environment that didn't teach it right, though anymore, what churches do? But when he donates to fighting maternal mortality he isn't thinking as hard as he needs to be, he isn't asking, okay, well, what if this just means a lot more girls will be born who wouldn't be, what if they grow up and they need all this, and what if the money isn't there, and they die? The most important questions with these kinds of charitable projects must be above all others "What is our plan for obsolescence?" — "What is our plan if we have to stop?"
jake
10d ago
No, opposite problem. They are effective, they aren't utilized properly. Prescribed wrong, treatment regimens not followed, both kinds of failure cause TB to gain further drug resistance.
jake
10d ago
Postpartum Hemorrhaging as leading cause of maternal deaths in Sierra Leone.
Particular disposition to hemorrhaging is my speculation, but when Sierra Leone at least was the world capital of obstetric mortality with >1000/100K while Haiti had <500/100K, a genetic basis is the rational guess.
jake
10d ago
John Green is a good point of discussion in philanthropy apropos USAID. The mediocre king of YA and man who appears truly convicted in his beliefs has, in addition to his tuberculosis charity, also contributed in fighting maternal mortality in Sierra Leone. He uses some of his money to, he believes, improve the world.
Does he? Are we a net positive when we spend money on maternal mortality and tuberculosis in the third world?
You ask John and the NGOs involved in these efforts what the causes are and they'll rifle off a list of things money fixes. For Sierra Leone, if they had better infrastructure, more hospitals, more trained medical workers, antenatal care and all the supplements in the world, their rates would fall. For tuberculosis, the relevant parts of the above and also staff ensuring patients complete their regimens. Americans regularly fail to complete antibiotic regimens, what of those in far poorer, far less equipped nations? Their failures are prolific. They use the wrong medications, or the right ones at the wrong amounts, and either way the patients at unacceptable frequency fail to complete their regimens.
Add to this pharmaceuticals in countries like India pumping out genericized versions of American pharmaceutical products under government license and we reach the outcome of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis.
And all this happened under robust US aid spending. More money in a year than John Green, who does well for himself, will make in his lifetime and beyond with the royalties of his estate. We can no longer afford to tolerate these practices. The solution is not more money, we've tried that, it's not infrastructure, health workers, medication access. The solution is those countries cease public treatment of tuberculosis, it is travel bans, and it is drone strikes on factories making knockoffs.
This is where John Green, Scott and EA utterly fail. It's true that with first-class western medicine far fewer mothers in Sierra Leone would die, but the root cause is population health, it's the genetic basis for particular risk and susceptibility to postpartum hemorrhaging. Throwing money at Sierra Leone will not solve that population health issue, it will also not improve its socioeconomic conditions. Nigeria is far wealthier, similar rates. Liberia at least for a time, far lower rates. Haiti, same as Liberia. When those mothers live through one birth, what happens? More children, more daughters, more future mothers, more future aid necessitated. But at least with Sierra Leone and broadly with efforts to lower maternal mortality you can't say an obvious externality is superbugs. With tuberculosis we know outright the process is creating superbugs and the response somehow has been "give even more money."
No, it is no longer time for that. If India cannot manage its tuberculosis issue for itself, if India has to keep on stealing American weapons against illness only for their population to dull them flat through misuse, they don't get help anymore, they don't get to make our drugs anymore. They must live or die on their own mettle, because they aren't playing a domestic game with domestic consequences, they're toying with a pandemic. Every dollar spent "fighting" TB in the third world is a dollar spent adding fuel to the fire of a real global health crisis. I can't blame John, he's so charmingly naive that he's constitutionally incapable of considering the solution is doing nothing at all. I can blame Scott, he knows better.
Directionally I agree with EA and with the moral judgment of value in eradicating disease. I believe it in completely, but lifetime treatments, fighting and suppressing and temporary cures, these do not constitute eradication. When we can engineer treatments that do eradicate, when we can target population health through genetic engineering, such as in reducing the risk of postpartum hemorrhaging, when we have the panacea that can wipe out AIDS and TB and whatever else, it won't be merely worthwhile but our true moral obligation to see it through the world over.
But efforts that increase suffering -- like increasing populations by creating more mothers at risk in Sierra Leone, creating more people throughout sub-Saharan Africa who will ultimately become infected with HIV in excess of those spared of mother-to-child transmission, and separately causing the emergence of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, these are not actual charity and they are not love. Blindness to the consequences of your actions from whatever flavor of naivety is not love, knowing what is truly best for someone and acting in accordance with that is love. Love would be making treatments in Sierra Leone dependent on subsequent sterilization, same for PEPFAR. Love in India would be establishing secure facilities where under no circumstances are patients permitted to leave during their entire course of their regimen. Call it Directly Observed Treatment, Until Cured. It may sound cruel, but our current "kindness" is leading many of these countries straight to hell.
jake
10d ago
It is what some judges do, very few. The nine on the Supreme Court.
District judges have no authority to issue injunctions against the President, and we know this because the first time it happened in the history of this country was by Judge James Robart in 2017. Do consider the history of this country: FDR hasn't quite passed from living memory, Trump may violate many contemporary norms, the travel ban violated no historic norms and represented no sweeping and dubious exercise of executive authority. Certainly not compared to the sweeping, unprecedented and wholly unconstitutional exercise of judicial authority by who ended up being multiple district judges attempting to actively restrain the authority of the executive. This is why SCOTUS ruled in favor of the XO per curiam.
I don't know if this is the hill where Trump should invoke Jackson -- probably because I expect SCOTUS will issue another per curiam -- but unless district judges are permanently shaken of the delusion that they have the constitution's endorsement to issue sweeping federal injunctions, let alone those against the executive, that moment is inevitable.
jake
13d ago
Based on the injunction order, it reads as based in risks of "disclosure of sensitive and confidential information" and "[making] the systems in question more vulnerable to hacking." This despite all of DOGE's supposed violations. Yeah, some of those don't necessarily qualify as risking "irreparable harm" but DOGE just chewed through USAID, the plaintiffs would have the argument to be concerned about the harm from sudden unconstitutional freezes of congressionally-apportioned funds. That argument was ignored. Maybe it's that narrow angle/narrow risk of judgment against thing.
Not that it matters. The executive can audit itself and investigate itself for any reason, "arbitrary and capricious" or otherwise, and with Musk's statement, it is otherwise. Treasury employees estimating a minimum of $50 billion a year in fraud gives them probable cause. So it sounds like all this injunction will result in is DOGE coming back with the DOJ as they announce a full forensic audit.
jake
18d ago
LLMs are convoluted calculators, not demons. Demons, if they ever roamed the earth, haven't since the Harrowing of Hell.
I doubted economics from simple reasoning. How can there be a debate? There should be a right way, or a comparatively optimal way, some country somewhere would have implemented. There's not. Humans can't solve it, humans can't approach solving it, and in support of this I wondered, what has economics actually done for humanity? There I asked GPT not for arguments or numbers, which would be suspect, but a list of its contributions. The list is either a bunch of things people have known for centuries, or things that just helps bankers, pass, or game theory. But by all means, please correct me if you know an area where economics has profoundly improved humanity.
jake
19d ago
Industries that are not internationally competitive
International competitiveness has only rarely been about a country that can deliver a superior product. In all other cases it has meant corporations can spend less and make more by outsourcing labor. Had, for example, it never been legal for Chinese-made products to be sold in this country, or not without tariffs tailored to make it prohibitive for companies to outsource their labor to China, they would have never been competitive. What was the benefit, Walmart? Some benefit.
jake
20d ago
Yes to clause one, half-yes to clause two.
If free trade does not produce as necessity holistic benefits, it is not an economic benefit. Policies based on "in benefiting a narrow percent of the population this may incentivize behavior that will yield wide benefits" are not holistic; policies based on "this will yield wide benefits" are holistic. Where FTAs yield the former, yes, where they yield the latter, no.
jake
20d ago
It's cheaper as the long consequences of economist-influenced policy. They nominally justified this on the idea we could replace millions of outsourced jobs by creating new and "more respectable" jobs, the actual justification, and the reason for its endorsement, was that the very wealthy would become even wealthier. We're about to run headfirst into the consequences of the delusion that we can keep creating more jobs, a delusion that will stand in history as the greatest failure of economics.
Some practices of finance are real and important. Other practices, like billionaires putting in massive shorts on companies before lobbying the government to outlaw the work of those companies, are more fake than those bureaucrats who kept getting paid even when they didn't show up to work for years. I also like banking here; as if because some of what they do has real utility, we have to accept all the lives they destroy and all the times they nearly crash the economy.
jake
20d ago
Trump’s order also includes a mechanism to escalate the rates if the countries retaliate against the U.S., as they are possibly prepared to do.
For decades, auto companies have built supply chains that cross the borders of the United States, Mexico and Canada. More than one in five of the cars and light trucks sold in the United States were built in Canada or Mexico, according to S&P Global Mobility. In 2023, the United States imported $69 billion worth of cars and light trucks from Mexico – more than any other country -- and $37 billion from Canada. Another $78 billion in auto parts came from Mexico and $20 billion from Canada. The engines in Ford F-series pickups and the iconic Mustang sports coupe, for instance, come from Canada.
“You have engines and car seats and other things that cross the border multiple times before going into a finished vehicle,’’ said Cato’s Lincicome. “You have American parts going to Mexico to be put into vehicles that are then shipped back to the United States.
“You throw 25% tariffs into all that, and it’s just a grenade.’’
In a report Tuesday, S&P Global Mobility reckoned that “importers are likely to pass most, if not all, of this (cost) increase to consumers.’’ TD Economics notes that average U.S. car prices could rise by around $3,000 – this at a time when the average new car already goes for $50,000 and the average used car for $26,000, according to Kelley Blue Book.
Over the last several years I've come to believe economics is a more fraudulent field of study than social science. As I'm not an economist, I asked GPT for what economics has contributed to mankind and the best I saw in its list was game theory. Meanwhile car manufacturers are shipping car seats "multiple times" across the border before they're actually put in a vehicle. It all feels so incredibly fake.
jake
27d ago
As a minor audiophile I think a lot about how great ChiFi is. My desk setup is Sennheiser 650s and a Monoprice DAC/AMP but when I'm on the go, I use earbuds. Recently after somewhat being forced to swap to a phone with no aux I trialed AirPods and being thoroughly unimpressed I just bought a dongle and figured might as well grab some new wired KZs. $20 and they blow past $100 earbuds, and I have $50 Linsoul TIN T2s with quality you'd have to spend >$200 to get from a western brand. It's location, location, location. Shenzhen, so many components made there, easy to get everything needed for high-quality IEMs and sell them for very low margin but at very high volume. It's one of the areas where China has been killing it, and I'll be very eager when a ChiFi brand I know as well and regard as highly as KZ starts putting out high-end competitive headphones without the massive luxury tax.
I also know the bad side of business in China. Though now as I think about it, the environment that allows DeepSeek as you claim it, or better, allows KZ and ChiFi, will also have the worst of the examples. There's a lot of shitty Chinese manufacturing, but it's not the rule. We might earnestly say "Circumstantial and correctable socioeconomic factors."
I regularly use OpenAI products, ChatGPT and DALL-E and now Sora. There I often have to frame things so I don't trip the censors. What content restrictions does DeepThink have, if any? You say it pushes back. Is it going to chastise me for wrongthink? Is it going to misgender someone to stop a nuke? Will it call me the N-word? I remember charts from however many months back about the measurable "increase in stupidity" of western LLMs, and I've assumed that has everything to do with the combination of beating it senseless to condition it against wrongthink, and then compounding that by forcing it to phrase everything in lawyerspeak so they can't be sued. A capable team that isn't devoting significant manhours to forcing their pattern-recognition machine to not recognize patterns would surely blow past the ones who do.
The prose you linked is decent, it has consistent tone and content. It's not quality yet, it would be impressive if written by a high schooler. But it's not a high schooler, it's what they have today, and will only get better.
I would have supported prosecution for Milley for at a minimum his apparent call to China. I would have also supported a fair investigation without necessarily a trial for Fauci, as I could believe he was the voice for a large or even very large group of people. But for both, I never actually thought they would be prosecuted. Even after everything it's still not quite how we do things in this country, and these men are old and already disgraced, they were before Trump's victory, and now especially, and so it's free, empty and yet still symbolic magnanimity to let them go off into retirement.
A pardon is a brand of shame. Granting implies guilt, accepting confirms guilt. For Milley, it's confirmation of his mutiny and sedition. For Fauci, whatever the specific crime being pardoned, probably gain of function, it will be viewed as a confirmation that everything he did was illegal and thus wrong. The right I see just knew they were criminals, they feel affirmed their beliefs. Some I see on the left are glad because either they fear tyranny and view this as protection or because of open spitefulness, others I see are blackpilling among themselves about the confirmation of guilt, about another new and terrible precedent, and about the general degradation of justice.
I wonder about "arising from or in any manner related to his service" per the actual text of the pardons @Gillitrut links below. I'm not a lawyer, so for all I know this phrasing is known by precedent as synonymous with a blanket pardon, but it reads to me like it's clausal to what they did in the course of their official duties, meaning it's not a blanket pardon. That if Milley killed a prostitute during lockdown the pardon wouldn't apply because it didn't arise from or relate to his official duties and that makes me think, mutiny isn't part of his official duties either.
Edit: Glazed right past "Any offenses against the United States"
I thought the odds of their prosecution before this it would be low, I still think it's low, but I think it's higher now than it was before. Whatever happens, for their legacies, they weren't mercifully granted pardons, they were inflicted with them.
Speaking as a former reddit powerjanny, not that insider knowledge is necessary as the admins posted this publicly, the Reddit "Russian bot" story was a total fabrication.
Outside of the post by [see link], none of these accounts or posts received much attention on the platform, and many of the posts were removed either by moderators or as part of normal content manipulation operations. The accounts posted in different regional subreddits, and in several different languages.
Karma distribution:
0 or less: 42
1 - 9: 13
10 or greater: 6
Max Karma: 48
Admins banned 61 accounts. It wasn't unusual for me to ban more spam accounts than that on multiple single days in any given month, and very often those accounts had already accumulated thousands of upvotes.
The American intelligence apparatus had highly politicized reasoning for depicting Russia as an adversary. They're also part of the true power in this country, so personally I just can't find credibility in their words. After all, I saw for myself the proliferation of the bot hoax on Reddit. I can't say with certainty China was or is shilling on the site, but I can say how I was on /pol/ more than anything else just after Wuhan was quarantined, and those coronavirus general threads had videos from China of things that never happened. If Chinese cyberwarfare finds value in sliding and psyopping /pol/ and fielding an army of "wolf warrior" bots on Twitter, it's fair to suspect them of doing the same on Reddit.
I'll also say, having been introduced to just a taste, Chinese meme culture is incredibly complex, brilliant, and funny, all this even passing through translation. Heavy state censorship in the information age is cleverness' perfect crucible and surely some number of those people take their talents to contribute them to the state. If they haven't been doing any of this and it's just all a series of unfortunate coincidences, I don't think it's because they're lacking citizens who know how to talk like Americans, argue like Americans, and truly so importantly, meme like Americans.
jake
1mo ago
Fair point about specifically the Family Guy mashups, but I've come across videos of whatever bigbrain podcast audio overlaid on whatever game, and that I'm confident is about attention spans.
jake
1mo ago
Congress can't legislate video length and I don't think it's necessarily the format. Shortform itself is not fundamentally bad, comedy is perfect for clips, same for sports and video games. Where these degrade is the race to the bottom in algorithm-pleasing content, and AI customer retention could be legislated against. The scientific data on the destructive nature of social media piles by the day, so there's a compelling health interest, and a law that flatly prohibits AI customer retention wouldn't fall afoul of other constitutional freedoms, it's not what they're randomly pushing, it's that the content is being randomly pushed, and these are multinational corporations engaged in interstate commerce, so even a very scope-limited interpretation of the Commerce Clause would find some degree of congressional authority in regulating such practices.
From there, it's simple. No endless scrolling, the sites can't serve unsolicited content based on, for example, the notion a user might want to watch a video, and especially might thus want to keep watching videos. For YouTube Shorts and others this would mean a user could go to their subscriptions and watch all the new Shorts, but when they watched them all, that's it. For Instagram and others it would mean no generic "explore" pages. It can't show you something because it thinks you might like it. It could possibly serve content analyzed as objectively or justifiably similar. If I enjoyed an hour-long history of whatever, I could ask it for other hour-long histories of whatever, but it wouldn't be analyzing clicks, view-counts or retention in its pushes. It would just be "Here's 25 videos of measurably similar content." Same for searching, no more "related" no more "you might also like" no more "users also searched," literal searched text in the title or the video transcript, limited tagging to prevent abuse in the video descriptions, and nothing from the comments. Ideally it should be suddenly very easy to search YouTube and be so specific or maybe so wrong that it returns no results.
And of course, a categorical prohibition on minors using the internet. This law wouldn't be targeted at the minors exactly, nor their parents. It would be targeted at corporations with astronomic fines for violations. I wouldn't be surprised if Google is already anticipating exactly such a law and has at least the framework for DeepMind-powered age-based captchas, because the only question I have is if their analytics determine with >99.99% accuracy any given user's age, or age bracket.
jake
1mo ago
Yes, I didn't articulate the point as well as I could. I think the best I could say is this: every bit of excess data collection by the US government is horrifying, as is all of that with regard to Five Eyes. Nominally about terrorism, maybe they've even stopped a fair bit, but I do often wonder if it's the NSA more and less behind the hacks of conservative websites and if it's also the NSA carrying out doxxes of certain individuals before laundering it through chosen contacts for parallel constructions.
Still, however dark the purposes are of our government as they collect such data, the severity is matched and multiplied when asking: but why does China want it?
It could be reciprocity, if the US government maintains a database of every single Chinese citizen. Do we? I think I would have heard that as a retort, "The US government is doing the same thing with Chinese citizens" is, to me, much stronger than mentioning USFG domestic surveillance. To the point I would consider it entirely exculpating if we did it first.
jake
1mo ago
I wish a little that it was about spying on users. I wish more that it was about how TikTok is the worst thing humans have ever created. Hypershortform content is gigafrying the developing brains of young people, and then there are the peculiarities of its content. TikTok text-to-speech, obnoxious subtitles on every video, five hundred thousand shitty clips to the same fucking 20 seconds of a song over and over and over, TikTok dances, splitscreen videos of Family Guy clips and Minecraft because attention spans have apparently become that bad. Adolescents are mainlining psychic polonium just from all of these, and that's before we consider the psychic demon core that is social media.
Spying on users would be a good enough reason. I don't know how people respond with "My government is spying on me." Yeah but it's our government. It's a different and in many ways a far grosser abuse of power but at least you can say there are legitimate reasons for the American government to keep data on American citizens. There is no conceivable above-board justification for the Chinese government creating-via-numerous-cyberattacks a general database of American citizens and its existence alone is grounds to ban them from all American telecommunications.
It was probably expedited to congress because of AIPAC but that was long after Trump tried to ban it and well after the Biden admin had it investigated and banned from government devices. It also must be said that however much congress and their AIPAC handlers get their hackles raised about Israel and JQ shit, the actual power in this country, the unelected bureaucracy, is clearly highly invested in righties wasting all their time posting about jews. Look no further than that preeminent JQ voice of Nick Fuentes being a fed.
Regardless of the actual motive, absolute justification for the ban is and has been the CCP having a tool to introduce political narratives in a social media platform used by a massive number of Americans. It's not Reddit or X where they have to work with shills and botting, it's not /pol/ where they spam slide threads and run psyops like they did at the onset of the coronavirus. It's a platform they control where they can push the figurative button and suddenly millions of people are seeing the exact content the CCP wants them to see. Google does that too, but I know their reasoning, why is 'based China' doing it? It's not because they're ideologically lockstep. It's because for the last decade they've been waging a next-generation war on the American people by destabilizing our politics. I still don't get how this has been missed, after a year of seeing commentators on the right making incredible snipes of nefarious deeds being snuck by the masses, only Sam Hyde has voiced a fraction of the animosity we need to exhibit toward China, which begins with expelling every single Chinese national in this country, and even he softened that with using it to frame a joke about honeydicking.
jake
1mo ago
PAFACA does expressly name ByteDance and TikTok but they're given as examples in its purpose, which is banning social media platforms owned by foreign adversaries such as the CCP. The Commerce Clause gives Congress plenary authority to regulate foreign trade and that's original intent, it's also a fundamental power of all sovereigns. Banning any foreign social media is nothing more than an embargo, and embargoes are intrinsically legitimate exercises of constitutional and sovereign authority.
I see you're a sockpuppet. I don't know if you're a venting lefty or a trolling righty or some other kind of bait, but there's something I've never seen talked about, and it's worth talking about. This topic is endless tragedy and comedy, tragic where the real villain of the 20th century, communism, wasn't vanquished, and comic where we explore the history of the word "fascism."
Other commenters here have already observed how "fascism" and "fascist" have become meaningless pejoratives, and that's what's funny: fascism has always been a meaningless pejorative. You can cite dictionaries but if you look at the original critiques by Marxists, be it Clara Zetkin or Trotsky or Georgi Dimitrov, you'd see it was meaningless when they wrote and spoke about it. It meant nothing. Well — almost nothing.
Fascism is a characteristic symptom of decay in this period, an expression of the ongoing dissolution of the capitalist economy and the decomposition of the bourgeois state. Fascism is rooted above all in the impact of the imperialist war and the heightened and accelerated dislocation of the capitalist economy that it caused among broad layers of the small and middle bourgeoisie, the small peasantry, and the “intelligentsia.” This process dashed the hopes of these layers by demolishing their previous conditions of life and the degree of security they had previously enjoyed. Many in these social layers are also disillusioned regarding their vague expectations of a profound improvement in society through reformist socialism.
The reformist parties and trade-union leaders betrayed the revolution, capitulated to capitalism, and formed a coalition with the bourgeoisie in order to restore class rule and class exploitation as of old. All this they did under the banner of “democracy.” As a result, this type of “sympathizer” with the proletariat has been led to doubt socialism itself and its capacity to bring liberation and renew society. The immense majority of the proletariat outside Soviet Russia tolerated this betrayal with a weak-willed fear of struggle and submitted to their own exploitation and enslavement. Among the layers in ferment among the small and middle bourgeoisie and intellectuals, this shattered any belief in the working class as a powerful agent of radical social change. They have been joined by many proletarian forces who seek and demand action and are dissatisfied with the conduct of all the political parties. In addition fascism attracted a social layer, the former officers, who lost their careers when the war ended. Now without income, they were disillusioned, uprooted, and torn from their class roots. This is especially true in the vanquished Central Powers [Germany and Austria-Hungary], in which fascism takes on a strong antirepublican flavor.
The historic function of Fascism is to smash the working class, destroy its organizations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery . . . . Fascism is not merely a system of reprisals, of brutal force, and of police terror. Fascism is a particular governmental system based on the uprooting of all elements of proletarian democracy within bourgeois society. The task of fascism lies not only in destroying the Communist vanguard but in holding the entire class in a state of forced disunity. To this end the physical annihilation of the most revolutionary section of the workers does not suffice. It is also necessary to smash all independent and voluntary organizations, to demolish all the defensive bulwarks of the proletariat, and to uproot whatever has been achieved during three-quarters of a century by the Social Democracy and the trade unions. For, in the last analysis, the Communist Party also bases itself on these achievements
Fascism is not a form of state power “standing above both classes — the proletariat and the bourgeoisie” . . . It is not “the revolt of the petty bourgeoisie which has captured the machinery of the state,”. No, fascism is not a power standing above class, nor government of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpen-proletariat over finance capital. Fascism is the power of finance capital itself. It is the organization of terrorist vengeance against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia. In foreign policy, fascism is jingoism in its most brutal form, fomenting bestial hatred of other nations.
I actually laughed the first time I read Trotsky's full critique because it really is just "Fascism is when the fascists get in there and fascist all over the place."
When you pare away the rhetoric you see exactly what they're doing: Our righteous freedom fighters, their fanatical terrorists.
"Nuh-uh, you're the ones exploited by powerful people who hide the truth and want to take away all your rights!"
They hated their opposition because they were a proletarian revolt who wanted to fix the existing system instead of overthrowing it and implementing communism. That's it, that's literally all it has ever been, commies mad that people saw through their horseshit but recognized the power in banding together. What else would communists do but wordswordswords slander them as having dishonest motives? And dishonest motives, oh boy. Look at every communist government in the last 100 years. "Not true communism" yeah maybe, but the purpose of a system is what it does, and every communist party that has ever risen to firmly control a country has behaved in exactly the same way. Tyranny and genocide.
What's happened since Trotsky et al. is not what I would call classic leftist behavior so much as the inclination that begets leftism as a method of obtaining political power: control of language. I do feel this is an important distinction, because where I view leftism poorly is almost entirely on the ones who manipulate language to equivocate and ultimately deceive, not those of their voters who believe they're doing good and want to out of genuine altruistic impulse. Unfortunately the people who reach high power from the left frequently use those techniques. There are minor exceptions in parts of Europe but it's not the case in the major leftist establishments of the US, the UK, France, and Germany, and they influence their comrades elsewhere. They manipulate terms, they equivocate and deceive. Like "fascism." They've had a century to define it around Nazi villainy, and then they adjust and readjust the definition so it can always be used to slander their opposition. The changing definition also probably continuously adds to the social inertia against anyone who might stand up and say "Hey, wait a second, the original definition was what?"
It's taken on socioreligious power, it's analogous to religious conviction. For me to tell someone "That's not fascism" or especially "You don't know what fascism is" is like saying "Good is bad, bad is good." It's a fundamental difference in paradigm, so such a statement has negative weight. It's meaningless.
There are governments who called themselves fascist and that would mean something here if the relationship between communism and fascism were discussed honestly, but it's never been honest. Fascist persists as an insult because communists persist, entrenched in power, and being masters of manipulative language, had means after obvious motive to downplay the horrors of communism and play up the horrors of nazism (both bad, the former orders of magnitude and uniquely worse). And we're humans and we can't help but calling our enemies the worst names we know. From Truman likening Dewey to fascists to generations of kids matriculating under communist professors who see fascism in everything and it repeats and repeats and repeats.
It's about to stop.
If I called one of my irreligious friends a reprobate sinner they'd laugh. They'd think I was joking, the word has no meaning for them. That's happening again. We're in the cultural singularity and culture is progressing very fast indeed. In at most 10 years, fascism and racism and sexism and every other -ism and -ist and -phobe, having finished the sprint from "No we're not/You're the real fascists" to "If it's bad, so be it" to "u forgot the gigachad" will then move into pure mockery, just as I would face if I went to proselytize in ratheism by condemning their lives of sin.
I'd like to believe there's value still in arguing this, and maybe things change just right in the coming years and we can have a real discussion, but that's the best case for this idea, approaching it on its angle and in good faith. I'm not approaching this idea on its angle, but I do mean this in good faith. Every last bit of power is being wrung from those words, its a score of levers about to snap off their fulcrums, and all the people who hold to these need to understand this and be prepared for when those words they use to frame their very sense of politics and the world become meaningless.
jake
1mo ago
Apropos Spotlight, I found it decent enough, but when the movie ended I thought "That's it?" It felt like it should have had another hour.
Discussions about Spotlight are invariably about the politics rather than it being a noteworthy entry in cinematic canon, because it's not. The Martian would have been a better-aging winner, and Fury Road was on the slate. The Big Short probably should have won, but one was another chance to dunk on the long groveling church and the other was about bankers. A tidy microcosm of power, that.
jake
1mo ago
Let's look at that Pew poll.
Overwhelmingly support deportation, overwhelmingly oppose "maintaining a diverse immigrant population," majority oppose "illegals gaining citizenship by marrying Americans," basically split on refugees, slight support for "filling labor shortages," supporting international students staying, and mostly supporting more "high skilled immigrants."
They support these things in the plain text, though that's not what's meant by the poll-makers. Let's update the poll to address the literacy issue on the topic by asking honest questions.
"Should we let literally anyone into this country who claims to be a refugee?"
I wonder how that one would do, because that's pretty much our current policy for people trying to get into this country except, just an example, white South Africans.
"Should we allow immigrants to fill labor shortages, even where 'labor shortages' include 'Indian hiring managers who will only hire other Indians' and 'employers who don't want to pay American citizens a living wage'?"
Something tells me that won't do so hot.
"Should universities be allowed to admit international students with worse applications than the American citizens whose spots they took? Should those students be allowed to then stay in the country?"
Might be a bit suspect.
"Admitting more high-skilled immigrants, and by 'high-skilled' we mean literally any foreigner with the equivalent of a bachelor's degree."
Probably a "let's not."
You take a poll question as indicative because for whatever reason you want or need it to be, but these are each a pinnacle motte and bailey. What a conservative thinks by "legal immigration" is not in any measure what the left has actually pursued, in America and in Europe. They are open to the idea of an easing of the rigorous legal process that culminates in naturalization because they still have the idealistic and decades-exploited view, but the essence of their opposition that can be seen through their view of mass illegal presence in this country would be applied exactly if informed on what people like the writers of this poll mean when they say "legal immigration." Because what the left means when they say that, after the examples above, includes but is by no means limited to something so bereft of effort as a rubber stamp on 20,000 Haitians dropped in Ohio or a group of young male "refugees" crossing the Mediterranean on an NGO-provided boat. (Both examples of the majority-opposed.)
They're "legal." Uh great, they think, so "legal" doesn't mean anything.
jake
1mo ago
There's something not right here, I hear familiar bells of dissonance. I notice I am confused.
Opposition to immigration is the principal impetus for the right. Not just the American right, opposition is the common view among the native peoples of all western nations. The belief of what to do isn't uniform, but "Too many, greatly reduce" is dominant. Musk shows an awareness of this, he's also shown an awareness of the discussions of the deep online right apropos "You have said the actual truth." He should know. Consider also his loudly backing AfD, a party that can be defined by its opposition to immigration.
If Musk believes all humans are fungible economic units, how does he turn right? If his shift as has been supposed by many including myself was about viewing the left as a threat, how does he not view the right as a graver threat for their anti-immigrant sentiment extending to close the tap on his source of engineers? How does he ever buy Twitter? Or, after buying it, carrying out the lifting of bans, diving into the discourse of the right, and seeing there "No we mean literally all of them are going back," realize what he's courted, renege and cut a deal? The media would need maybe two weeks of news cycles and his image would be rehabilitated for the normie masses while in the background he received the necessary assurances of allowing him to continue his corporate administration as he sees fit. But there again, if how he wants to manage his corporations by his ostensibly aggressive prioritization of foreign labor, why does he ever consider the left a bigger problem than the right?
I had more and I cut it down and now I've again written more than I think I need because I'm pretty sure all of you reading this knows all of these points. What I run into is that for the last few years for Musk, though really it seems it's been basically all of his career, people have bet against him, for the absurdity of his ideas, for supposed incompetence, for ignorance, more lately for him being "evil", and they've lost every time. This must be stressed enough, they have lost every single time. Or at least every single time it's mattered. So I look at him and wonder, how does he believe the FEU view? He's not evil, stupid or incompetent. Did he just not know what's actually happening?
People are complex but plenty of times it is the mundane or contradictory explanation rather than the fun/schizo/5D chess theory. I'm probably grasping at nonexistent straws, as I so often do. Sure, he believes in this one area of hyper-pure tabula rasa egalitarianism, despite living a life of evidence against it. Sure, he holds the root ideal that underlies the California approach to homelessness and crime, not to mention trans advocacy, he's just not extrapolated one more step to shake it off.
Still I think a possible explanation for his response is this: he believed talent came from India because he had convincing, not necessarily good and certainly not great, but convincing enough reasons to believe it did. In a very short period of time he has since discovered those hiring for his corporations have prioritized Indians because they are Indians, have praised and promoted along Indians because they are Indians, and may be benefiting in appearances from work done primarily by not Indians, all while repeatedly rejecting superior talent because they are not Indian. And so he has struggled, in recognizing his mistake and perhaps in rationalizing against a roiling blood rage at not simply being taken for a fool, but taken in such a way that it is a direct attack on his life's work of getting off the rock and making humans an interplanetary species.
I don't know. Again I'm grasping at straws in seeking fantastic explanation over the simple and probable one. But, and I'm paraphrasing what Sam Hyde said in his video, if this is a real belief for him, not something from a lack of knowledge and understanding but something he won't get past, he's not the man we all hope he is, and he will lose.
A hypothetical set of "Reasons to live in a country" doesn't necessarily subsume the set of "Reasons to as a tourist visit that country" but it can be assumed there will be significant overlap. The argument here is a person who would go to Thailand to indulge in pedophilia would be unlikely to see a reason to permanently reside there. This doesn't follow, people move countries to facilitate all other kinds of crime. Or maybe you're arguing pedophiles as a group might generally have the resources to take a trip to Thailand but not to successfully immigrate. This is stronger, but still falls, because they're not a uniform mass.
The subgroup of the population with pedophilic tendencies includes bottom-feeders who would be lucky to leave their home town. It also includes the opposite, the highly connected and well-resourced who cover their tracks. There will also be those at neither extreme, who are fastidious enough to prioritize not going to prison over their perversions, who are perverted enough to find appealing the idea of living in a country with lax policing where they may regularly indulge, and who are capable enough to be successful at moving to such a country. In short, there are without question white expatriates permanently residing in Thailand and elsewhere in southeast Asia because of and in pursuit of their pedophilia.
This is circumstantial evidence for Unsworth. Not enough to indict, but more than enough to fairly suspect. Yeah, if he's not that, it sucks, but he can't be shocked because that's what happens when you move from Britain to Pedoville in Pedo Province in the Kingdom of Pedoland. This is the reason Musk called him specifically a pedophile and why he initially doubled down on it before deleting the tweets. It wasn't apropos of nothing, it was from the I guess uncommon understanding of what goes on in Thailand. I say "uncommon," above the SNL skit I linked was from 10 years ago, and that's its joke.
Whether it's made locally or shipped to such nations the solution remains prohibiting methods of treatment that risk further drug resistance, e.g., changing to requiring the locking down of patients for the entire duration of treatment.
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