quiet_NaN
3hr ago
This strategy dates back to (at least) the civil disobedience of the civil rights movement (which was tremendously successful).
Basically, you want to be a nuisance. Public attention thrives on controversy. If you are standing peacefully in your assigned corner protesting whatever, people will just ignore you.
Ideally, the state will react widely out of proportion, thereby generating sympathy for your cause.
Ideally though, the cause comes first, and the civil disobedience comes later. I do not watch much Youtube, but I suppose for a lot of youtubers it is the other way round -- the recklessness is their brand, and they are happy to put it in the service of whatever cause.
quiet_NaN
5hr ago
Not really. "We" here is a reference to the kind of blue-collar worker @Goodguy was talking about (i.e. someone who puts a lot of their identity into being the kind of person who works hard in a physically demanding job), a demographic which is underrepresented here. If @hydroacetylene's "we" is accurate and he is indeed a regular blue-collar guy, he is providing the Motte with useful information we wouldn't otherwise have access to.
Ok, I missed that context.
quiet_NaN
7hr ago
I think that with goods for conspicuous consumption, the price finding works a little different than for other goods.
Any vintner deciding to make fifty millions by just producing 100 bottles of a wine which is worth 500k$ a bottle will fail miserably, because the very fact that there are 100 bottles on the market will cap the price.
If anyone in SV is spending 30k$/weekend on an escort, that is obviously conspicuous consumption. The point is to signal that he can spend that much money. The identity of the escort is secondary, could be a former porn star, or Aella, the important thing is that his buddies have heard of her. If his buddy replies that he spend 10k$ on hiring an escort who is just as hot and smart as Aella, but much less famous, that has much less signaling value.
I think the bottleneck is not being hot and smart, it is being famous. There are thousands of actors in Hollywood who are pretty great actors. Most of them do not earn outrageous sums per movie, because a film-maker will have a hard time to persuade the audience that they are indeed good. The top tier actors will reliably draw a crowd because they have a large fan base, and being able to pay them millions is a good signal for the movie having a high production value, so the special effects will also be great.
When you said:
women with high enough IQ to comprehend and execute that plan, while also being willing to be prostitutes and prostitutes to nerds, are in short supply.
that rings to me like
Tom Cruise makes 100M$ per movie, so $ADJECTIVES actors like him are in short supply.
To which I would reply that obviously Tom Cruise is in short supply (likely intentionally as a business decision). However, all of that is due to him being famous. A nobody with his acting talent and looks entering Hollywood would probably land some roles, but would make absolute peanuts compared to him unless he got lucky and rose to the top, and anyone contemplating to go to LA and shoot movies or to SV and work as an escort would be served much better by anchoring on the median income of their peers than on the top earners.
quiet_NaN
19hr ago
What's pseudo about it?
Agreed. Come on, we are supposed to be high-decouplers here. I can certainly hate everything Musk represents politically and still acknowledge that he had some amazing (if over-hyped) successes with SpaceX and Tesla.
I think it is safe to say that most sex workers are not intellectuals. But that is a correlation, not an invariant law of the universe.
quiet_NaN
19hr ago
we see prostitutes in the same category as drug dealers, loansharks, and other dubiously legal occupations
Consensus building. I for one do not see them that way. I do not think there is anything bad about prostitution per se. About half the adult humans have a much stronger sex drive than the other half, and unfortunately are mostly interested in sex with that less interested half. A lot of ink has been spilled about the decline of romantic relationships, but for our purposes it is enough to assert that humanity was shaped by the uncaring forces of evolution and now finds itself in an environment way out of the training distribution.
Sure, sex with a sex worker will never be maximally wholesome, it would always be more wholesome to find some partner who is just enthusiastic about sex with you. But this is the perfect (but probably unachievable) being the enemy of the good.
The same argument has been made about semaglutide, actually. "But would it not be much more wholesome if you changed your diet on your own and exercised?" Fuck that.
I see prostitution more on a moral level with theme parks, not meth labs. There are probably some hardcore cosplayers who view Disney parades -- where people simply walk around in some Mickey Mouse costume because that is their day job -- rather because they feel deeply drawn to become that character -- as an abomination. And others might say that theme parks are fine, but roller coasters are the devil's work, and humans should just be happy to experience 9.81m/s^2 towards a fixed direction as God intended, or might claim that most actually existing theme parks are ecological disasters and lead to animal suffering. Or decry the commercialism of all of it. But in the end, theme parks are not inherently evil. They simply offer the fulfillment of normal human drives (e.g. for excitement and adventure) for money. If capitalism can be trusted to deliver your daily bread, why should you not also trust it to deliver a fun day for your family?
Whenever we say "this thing is sacred, it shall not be traded for profane goods" (e.g. for sex, but also for the saving of a human life, or a kidney), that tends to create outcomes which are just further from the Pareto frontier.
quiet_NaN
20hr ago
I am not convinced. Per google, the most expensive bottles of wine cost about half a million. This does not mean that there is a supply shortage of wine, merely that weird things happen when the uberrich engage in bidding wars. If the median price for an escort in SV was 10k$, then I would conclude that there is indeed a supply shortage.
quiet_NaN
20hr ago
I think the workaround for escorts is generally that you are not paying for the sex, you are paying them to keep you company, and it is hard for the state to prove if any sex takes place and if so if it was part of a transaction.
Also, rich people's vices do not have the social costs of poor people's vices, generally, and therefore are more tolerated. If some banker wants to do cocaine, that is mostly a victimless crime -- he is very unlikely to stab a guy to steal his wallet to pay for his next fix.
Lower class prostitution definitely has some externalities. A prostitute who receives her customers in her flat or walks the street of some neighborhood will definitely affect the quality of living of her neighbors even before you add pimps and organized crime. With high-end prostitution, these things are simply not a concern -- if the john is renting a fancy hotel suite, then the hotel will gladly deal with all the inconveniences their fornication imposes on the neighborhood.
Also, if we start prosecuting every sexual relation which was mediated by the expenditure of material goods, half the country would be in jail. There are probably cases of some guy getting laid despite owning only the clothes on his back, but as a general rule being poor will decrease your SMV. I am not sure if anyone has done a RCT on this, but if taking your date out for some fries salvaged from the McDonalds garbage bin resulted in as much sex as treating her to a three-course menu, half of the demand for fine dining would probably go away.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
It's obvious that aella has become obscenely wealthy and gained a ton of social status from her pursuits, but I'm still somewhat shocked at the sheer amount these women are making.
I work a pretty boring, standard corporate marketing job, and apparently these prostitutes are taking home almost my entire after-tax yearly income in one weekend.
So close. You are questioning if the escorts who earn big bucks really are worth their money, but don't stop to think if the same might be true for the tech bros who are paying the escorts.
If hiring expensive escorts is conspicuous consumption, then so is hiring expensive tech bros. Plenty of companies decide that paying their CEOs with stock options to the tune of 100M$ is worth the money -- likely for status reasons, some species of white elephants, then so is the CEO paying top tier escorts for a weekend. After all, what use is a astronomical salary if you do not spend it? Many guys end up spending a decent fraction of their paycheck on romance. Paying your ex-wife half of what you own -- or paying child support, for that matter -- generally ends up being more expensive than paying an escort, I think.
A lot of the goods of conspicuous consumption run into totally diminishing returns, where every doubling of the price gets you less value. Going from a 15k$ car to a 30k$ car will be a whole different experience. Going from a car worth one million to one worth two is probably not even going to be noticeable. Likewise, there is a difference between a four dollar wine and a two dollar wine, but if you spend 200k$ rather than 100k$ on a bottle you are most likely just enjoying the price tag. Likewise, I would likely not to be able to tell the difference between an evening with a 10k$ escort and a 100k$ escort (note to self: think about putting that experiment on gofundme). Both will be hot, cultivated and great at sex, I imagine. The differences will probably be completely beyond me, like "but the more expensive one is more focused on the philosophy of utilitarianism, while the cheaper escort is more into continental philosophy, which is less in demand by rich johns right now".
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Sure. Both parties do their best to make the election outcome not reflect the will of the people, and both parties whine about how their loss does not reflect the actual sentiment of the population because the other side did that. Gerrymandering and making it maximally inconvenient for demographics who lean towards the opponent to vote while making it maximally easy for your demographics to vote (think "we will make you wait in line for hours" vs "there is a bus to pick the elderly up from care homes and ferry them to the voting booth") are time-honored strategies.
However, both these strategies and the exaggerated whining about them are of limited badness. The effects of gerrymandering on the outcome of a particular election can easily be determined with sixth-grade math, there is little dispute what the outcomes would have been if the districts were drawn differently, or the difference between seat distribution and popular vote. Likewise, wrongful claims of voter suppression are of limited badness, because they can not persuade the people who voted that their vote did not count, only that their candidate would have done better if the other voters were not suppressed.
By contrast, saying "the totals do not reflect the will of the people because of election fraud, i.e. either your vote did not make it into the totals, or the other side just stuffed the ballot with fake votes to win" is much more corrosive. The main selling point of democracy is that it offers people a way to change their government without all the bother of violently overthrowing it. Telling someone that the ballot box is broken is the same as telling them to use the cartridge box instead.
From the link, it seems that Stacey Abrams mostly did the former, whining about voter suppression. While some might be persuaded to rise in armed resistance despite their vote being counted because they think that there is some Black voter whose vote was suppressed, I feel the danger of that is limited -- the actual nucleus of such a resistance movement would have to be the suppressed voters, so if there are hardly any there is no movement.
By contrast, denying the legitimacy of the Biden election is a basic tenet of MAGA. It is not just a cope from the base (which we certainly have about 2024 on the left, like "Musk stole the election for Trump"), it is what a Republican congressman has to claim to believe to be in good standing with his party.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
A 1% chance isn’t zero chance.
Yes, but it is not a 1% chance. 1% chances are fine. By contrast, this is astronomical. Suppose that that in the bluest neighborhood on the planet, there is a chance of 99.9% that anyone will vote Democrat, far exceeding the margin of even one party states. Still, the odds of none of 13000 voting for the GOP would be merely 2 in a million. It is utterly implausible.
In this case though, I think that the better explanation is an utterly stupid way to update the votes (by bunches per candidate), not the most incompetent voting fraud in history.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Really? That seems terrible. Leave it to the Americans to look at their electoral college system and decide that there is still room for horrible procedural improvements.
Voting is not very hard to do right, it can (and should be done) with just paper and a ballot box. If a citizen is concerned about voter fraud, they should be free to observe the ballot box during the whole voting process and then observe the counting process. Once you have finished counting your district, then and only then will you send a preliminary result on. We do it like that in Germany and it just works. Anything more technological is a terrible idea, because it will be very hard to persuade people who have no clue about computers that their vote was counted correctly, and it will be even harder to persuade the people who are very knowledgeable about computers.
If it takes all night to count the votes, that is fine, you will not be penalized on the democracy index for that.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Ah, the myth of the stolen election rears its ugly head again.
As conspiracy theories go, it seems rather weak. I mean, the way election disputes were settled pre-Trump was generally through the SCOTUS. In 2020, Trump had the most conservative court any Republican could wish for, the one who would overturn Roe. If the Democrats had a way to blackmail the SCOTUS, we would not have gotten Dobbs.
Say what you will about the left, but they at least have the grace to accept a defeat at the ballot booth when they get handed one. With Trump/MAGA, it is not "the election was rigged because of this or that irregularity", but it is fundamentally "the election was rigged because our side did not win".
Also, who was arrested and punished for merely disputing the election result, exactly? It is a free country, you can claim that an election was stolen or that your neighbor is an alien impostor all day long. However, if you decide to do something about your beliefs, like storming the capitol or shooting your neighbor you will still get in trouble for that.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Most people would agree that it is ethical, perhaps mandatory, to abort nonviable children who will live only hours in agonizing pain after birth.
The minority who sees abortion as murder would disagree, I think, as they are also very anti-MAID as a general rule.
Personally, I see a fetus as replaceable and thus am happy to leave the choice with the pregnant woman. Typically, a couple which became pregnant by choice and aborted for medical reasons will simply try again. So another way to phrase this would be to say that the people in Iceland are replacing Down syndrome babies with healthy babies. This is the closest we will get to a cure of trisomia 21 this side of the singularity.
I think this was a point of contention over at ACX at some time, where (IIRC) Scott was basically saying that schizophrenia can be 'cured' through genetic testing. I tend to agree. Sure, if my parents had access to genetic testing, they might have decided to pick a fetus which less prone to depression than I am -- and I am fine with that, because back then I did not have interests of my own.
Also, the people getting upset about medical abortions could probably easily prevent them by pledging to adopt and raise Down children.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
the act of treating a person as an object, a commodity, or a tool, rather than as a whole human being with their own agency, feelings, and rights. The most common form, (sexual) occurs when a person is reduced to a mere object of sexual desire.
At the risk of sounding like a hippie commie, objectification is the default mode to relate to trade partners. The relationship of an Amazon shareholder and a worker in a fulfillment center or software programmer is one of 100% objectification. The shareholder does not know or care if the worker is putting in the hours to pay for college for his kid or to finance a substance habit. The only thing he cares about is that the fulfillment of the orders happens in a cost-effective way. Humans are only employed because robots and LLMs are not cost-effective ways to replace them (yet).
Nor do I think that this is bad, or would be different in some commie utopia. The ideal would be that humans use each other as tools in ways which incidentally also improves the situation of the used person. But this is merely a question of trade balance. I do not want my coffee to be produced by someone whom I can appreciate as a person with agency and feelings, perhaps deciding that today I will buy coffee beans from that farmer because I sympathize with his backstory or whatever. I only care about the general stuff in aggregate, that he is not enslaved and not overly exploited. Otherwise, my caring takes the form of pieces of paper with pictures of presidents on it, and I do not expect him to care about my specific situation, why I feel the need to caffeinate etc. As long as I care about his well-being in the abstract that I don't want him exploited, and he cares about mine enough that he does not want me to drink coffee with a lot of mercury in it, objectifying the other as a source of labor or funds seems perfectly fine.
Nor do I think that the objectification in sex work is one sided. If the guy sees the sex worker as a collection of tits and holes, it seems likewise reasonable to assume that the sex worker will see the john as a wallet with a cock attached to it.
When I walk through the city, I tend to model other people as bounding boxes for collision avoidance. Does this make me more or less evil than a guy who instead models the people around him as a collection of sex organs?
I do not have a bigger point to make (I am not into super-transactional sex, personally), but I find it dishonest to pretend that objectification is bad when it is the default way we relate to other people in any polity larger than Dunbar's number. "The cashier scanned my food" is as much as an objectification as "the big-chested blonde walked by my table".
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I am neither a prediction market nor cryptocurrency expert, but this seems to be bad from the very start.
A good prediction market is one where no actor can unilaterally decide the outcome at zero costs to themselves. For example, you might ask if some politician would remain in power, because they can not unilaterally decide to stay in power if external factors (impeachment, assassination, etc) force them out, and while they are free to resign, this will typically come at high costs to themselves.
This one seems as bad as a mention market. It is like playing roulette when the rules are that after you have placed your bet, the croupier will just place the ball at the number they feel should win and announce it.
Even if MicroStrategy will not directly change their behavior to fix the prediction market ("On Tuesday, we sold 100 sat worth of bitcoin, so better pay up, sucker"), it seems still a bad market to compete in because another party will have a substantial information advantage. Like, if you bet on the outcome of some kind of competition, like an election, sports event or war, some people have some insider information (like 'Player X got injured in training'), but at least their edge will be limited.
So there is already plenty of excellent reasons not to play in this market even before one gets to the fact that the resolution criteria will be just changed ex post facto to benefit the investors of one side of the trade. (On the object level, it seems very simple. If MicroStrategy sold any BTC, that would involve transactions on the block chain. So the "on-chain data" will reflect that fact (once the transaction is made part of the block chain by a miner). The fact that it is not commonly known who owns each address is quite frankly just a skill issue. Also, there is obviously a difference between "cutoff date for the bet" and "determination on what the facts were at the cutoff date". If a runner wants to contest his second place on grounds that it took photographic evidence to determine that he was not first, and that this clearly indicates that at the time he crossed the finish line, there was no credible information that he was not first, he would be laughed out of any court.)
I am also a bit surprised at this failure mode. My understanding is that people who hold some kind of token get to vote on the resolution of disputed markets, but the Polymarket docs I found do not go into a lot of detail. Ideally, one would want the people who vote to be the people who own Polymarket. Betters would ideally judge the worth of the company against their trade volume and only deal with them if they are convinced that a rug pull will not be more lucrative for the company than keeping running honestly.
What is interesting is that the trading volume of that market was 400M$, which is high but still small compared to the worth of Polymarket (16G$ or so). The worth of Polymarket hinges almost entirely on the presumption that it will fairly resolve markets. Nobody is going to play in a Casino where the boss will simply tell the dealer that the ball did not come to rest at the red nine but at the black 22 next to it.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
From the guardian article:
He was cautioned about the risk of further imprisonment for speaking English in the Arabic courts.
Could obviously all be a fabrication on his part, I was not present for the proceedings. But like the guardian, I would tend to believe him on that part, and see it as a scathing indictment of the court process. I do not know how Western courts handle language barriers, I presume that they use interpreters (but probably can't afford simultaneous interpreter?), but I am sure that they will not simply tell the accused to STFU with his heathen tongue or be held in contempt.
And a court which is fishy in that way is probably also fishy in other ways.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Religious exemptions are a nonsense idea.
Either a rule is genuinely important to have and exceptions shouldn't be given out (because it's important!), or the rule isn't actually important and therefore shouldn't exist.
I agree for the specific case. If a society decides that knives are bad, it seems silly to make exceptions.
Other things are more general rules than hills society is willing to die on. If you get a court date, there is a strong expectation that you will appear on that date, but you can probably get an exemption if your best friend is marrying on that day or you have an important medical appointment scheduled. There is little lost in also making "it is sabbath and it would be really inconvenient for me to get to court" also a valid excuse. Likewise, if Christians want to take a sip of wine with the Eucharist, it would be an asshole move to require their church to get a liqueur license. If kids miss a day of school a year for an important religious holiday, we can probably make an exception from the rule of mandatory school attendance, nor does there seem much point to require someone to take PE classes during Ramadan (or ever, but sadly society disagrees with me on that one).
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Unlike Floyd, Nowak was actually murdered
This is consensus building. [A jury convicted Chauvin of murder 2] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Derek_Chauvin). I am sure that his defense made pretty much the same arguments as you did, and obviously did not convince the jury.
Generally, you want to deter people from doing stuff which contributes to bad outcomes even when it is unclear if their contribution alone would have caused the bad outcome. If three people stab a victim and cause it to die from blood loss, we are not generally going to determine if the any of the assailants caused woulds which would have ensured death on their own, or if perhaps the victim might have survived if he had not taken an Asprin beforehand. Instead, we say that they all maliciously contributed in an attack which predictably resulted in death, so they are all murderers.
For Floyd, it seems plausible that Chauvin contributed to his death. He certainly acted with reckless disregard for his life. I do not give a rats as if his behavior was department policy, he can join the illustrious group of all the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg defense who were convicted despite claiming superior orders.
--
I will grant you that the optics in the new case are almost as terrible as for Floyd. But while the police response was inappropriate in hindsight, it certainly lacks Chauvin's recklessness, the contribution to the death is less likely and there is a convenient guilty party on which to focus the ire.
Personally, I think that an absolute no-brainer would be to cancel the religious exemption to the laws forbidding knives. An openly carried weapon is a promise of violence. Religious exemptions are for stuff like keeping the sabbath or covering your hair on your passport photo, not for rules society really cares about, like bodily integrity of kids or public safety.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
I will grant you that just from the facts I have read, it is entirely possible that Wolfgang's company accumulated the debt through straightforward fraud and they are now living in luxury due to their ill-gotten gains.
However, I do not think this is overly likely. I surmise that the local law makes a distinction between fraud and debt, and it would be strange to only charge the latter if the former applied.
The more central possibility seems to be that his company either got unlucky or got played. Suppose you are a local noble, and you desire the company of a foreigner. You know your legal system works in practice, against whom laws get enforced and who is untouchable. So you get him to accept a contract with a local government, and then subcontract a significant amount to a locally owned company. The subcontractor does not deliver. Now he is a debtor to the government, and a creditor to some local noble. The court system is not going to send a local to debtors prison for a debt owed to a foreigner, but it will gladly send the foreigner to prison -- he might have offshore assets he could still cough up to shorten his stay.
I can not rule out the possibility that everyone rotting in debtor's prison in Dubai is guilty as sin, there might be a correlation between willingness to do business in autocraties and crookedness, after all. But I find a conviction in some Dubai court to be only very weak Bayesian evidence of guilt of anything, because I do not trust their justice system very much.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
I agree, the median US net worth is not 19 million dollars, after all.
(It also matches intuition -- 0.05% is an amount you can spend every day for almost six years before going bankrupt. Literally the kind of money you can spend on a whim without thinking too much about it. If the average American tells their spouse they dropped 9k$ on a whim (e.g. on a life-sized dinosaur model, or a fancy gaming rig, or a high end vacation), I think it is likely that their spouse would go wtf instead of treating it like Tuesday.)
quiet_NaN
6d ago
I think you are pessimistic about the consequences of nuclear war. I do not think that there are enough nukes in the world to glass the US.
Popular depictions involve the survivors either donning spiky leather straps and becoming raiders or turning into man-eating mutants. I am a bit more optimistic. The United States does not seem like the kind of institution you can destroy simply by turning DC into a parking lot. Nor do I think that starvation is inevitable. If the 50 biggest cities are gone, it seems like the US would have a huge food surplus.
Nor would the industrial capability drop below that of Argentina. Some sectors (finance, insurance, software development, liberal arts) would be devastated, but plenty of factories seem to be located in smaller towns, and there would be no reason to mothball them until some vault-dweller discovers them centuries later.
Absent cobalt bombs, I don't think radiation would wipe out the US population either. Anchoring on Hiroshima, it seems that more people are killed by the blast and heat than radiation poisoning, and cancer deaths are a distant third. If cancer rates in the midwest increase by 10x, that is not nice but also not enough to collapse civilization. And billionaires would be exempt anyhow because they could afford to consume more expensive low contamination food.
That is not to say that nuclear war is fine. The QALY costs are enormous. The US could well lose its exceptional status in the world. The disruption of international supply chains might throw the country back to the tech level of the cold war. The voter base of the Democratic party would be devastated. The political system might not survive intact, and would likely be replaced by something more authoritarian.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
As someone else mentioned, if shit hits the fan, they will not let him live the good life while their fake country collapses.
I think a point could be made that all countries are fake.
Also, the number of countries which let billionaires live the good life while collapsing is just about zero. There might be some principled libertarians who would feel compelled to respect the property rights of the rich even in the middle of a collapse, but the average policeman or soldier is not going to watch his family starve while the rich feast.
In democracies, runaway inflation will reliably cause the election of extremist candidates. And dictatorships are even worse -- dictators as a rule do not believe in respecting human rights, so they have no principled reason to respect the property rights of the rich. Sometimes they even expropriate and imprison rich foreigners when they are not collapsing even though it might seem in their long term interests to not do so.
Your best bet in an authoritarian state is probably having close personal ties to the dictator (e.g. through marriage, Crusader Kings style), but even then there is always the danger of an internal coup. It seems hard for foreigners to have collectively enough political clot that the generalissimo feels that he can't throw one under the bus from time to time.
If I was a billionaire, I would still bet on the US. The 1% class is very good at looking out for their own interests. Ideally, I would recommend staying out the culture war and partisan politics. Let the peasants fight about affirmative action or abortion, the rich can thrive both under GWB and Obama.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
I think that his phrasing is still okay. We use phrases like "Russian aggression" without bothering to add a fig leaf about some Russians not supporting the war in Ukraine, and perhaps even being in prison for protesting it.
If someone says "The Iranians can not be trusted to stick to the terms of the nuclear deal", it is obviously a shorthand for the Iranian leadership, because the average Iranian citizen will not be in the position to enrich uranium in her basement, so there is no claim about her trustworthiness being made.
Likewise, the average US citizen does not run the internet. And I think it is very true to say "In the current political system, the median US voter can not be trusted to elect a wise government which is (among other things) a good steward of the internet." Note that this leaves a lot of possibilities open, from "the US is run by the deep state, which cancels any anti-snooping candidate" to "most US citizens are genetically inclined towards the military-technological complex, so of course they vote for spying and bombing" and all the more likely explanations in between.
If Cory had written about the US 'stealing' (i.e. annexing) Alberta in the Obama era, the median response would have been to recommend that he finds a more reputable crack dealer. The framing back then was very much activists vs surveillance state. Today, the US is openly neo-colonialist (like Trump bragging about securing Venezuelan oil), and the EFF seems completely sidelined in the culture war, the MAGA idea of privacy is Palantir, and the opposition will want to spy on you in case you do a racism. Realistically, the chances of the US electing a government which cuts down on spying seem as good as that of the Mensheviks overthrowing Stalin in 1950.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
but I admit my general opinion of him has lowered, as this recent article has subtle xenophobia.
I will admit that I did not read all of it, but I failed to detect anything I would call xenophobia in the parts which I did read. If there is a sentence about low-IQ foreign barbarians ruining the UK, I must have missed it.
Presumably, your claim is that Cory Doctorow (born in Canada and naturalized as a UK citizen) is xenophobic towards the US.
If so, this seems a bit disingenuous to me. I mean, he is closely aligned to the EFF, which is a US-based organization critical of surveillance states. The EFF does not seem especially anti-American to me. Sure, they spend more time fighting against US surveillance efforts than Chinese surveillance efforts, but I don't think that this is because they love China or hate the US, but rather because their members are based in the US and the political system allows them trying to influence laws in the US but not in the PRC.
A central example of a xenophobe would be someone who dislikes another culture he knows very little about. "I don't understand their language, their food smells strange, their customs are weird, they are probably up to no good and I want them gone."
By contrast, Cory Doctorow could very much pass as a US citizen without too much effort on his part. I am sure that he has more knowledge of the US political system than the median citizen, and a big chunk of the culture he engages with is likely US-origin.
People are very much allowed to have opinions on countries they are not citizens of. There is no part during the naturalization process where the officials tell you "you may now have an opinion about our government". I am a German, and yet I have opinions about governments and policies of pretty much any country I know anything about, from the US to North Korea.
I think that your analogy is good, but not perfect, because in sports there is actually a rather objective measure of performance. The sport stars who make millions will generally crush amateurs.
With sex workers, just like with with movie actors or wine bottles, there is no clear objective comparison between competitors. It is the realm of taste and fame, whose assignment is illegible.
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