ABigGuy4U
1d ago
The Turing test is like the Bechdel test. It’s not a perfect heuristic, and it’s misused in a lot of ways, but the point is that it’s a fairly low bar that most things at the time still weren’t able to clear.
But were performers ever a large part of the economy?
They weren’t ever a huge load-bearing part of the economy, but it was a lot larger than it is now. Back before video and audio recording technology, if you wanted to listen to music or watch a play, someone had to do it live for you. That meant there were a lot more paid performers, and a lot more people skilled in music and the performing arts as a serious hobby. While the economic loss was relatively small compared to say, the loss of manual labor, it does mean there are more people who feel unfulfilled because they will never be able to support themselves doing what they love. It’s a psychological loss similar to the complaints you hear by artists about AI drawings.
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
Even the drugged-out lumpenproles taking to the streets in 2020 were mostly acting because they knew they had official cover. Police that wouldn’t open fire on them, shady mystery funds that would immediately post their bail, political DAs that would recommend sub-minimum sentences, and a news media that would paint them as heroes. And I suspect many of them were receiving a salary for it.
ABigGuy4U
2d ago
However, realists would argue that states cannot know the intentions of other states, and so often over-react.
True. Unfortunately the United States pillaging the Russian economy, rigging their elections, funding separatist movements, loudly and publicly stating through various think tanks that they intended to cause the collapse of the country, and harboring child-murdering Chechen terrorists all combined to give the misplaced appearance of ill-will.
ABigGuy4U
2d ago
Russia has no more right to demand subservience from Ukraine than the US does from Canada or Mexico.
And yet the United States has a long, long history of demanding subservience from both:
•Invading Canada twice in 1777 and 1813 for not sufficiently supporting the American revolutionary project
•Sponsoring and funding a breakaway republic from Mexico in 1836, then officially recognizing that breakaway republic
•Launching a Special Military Operation against Mexico in 1848 and extracting massive territorial concessions because Mexico tried to destroy that breakaway republic
•Threatening to invade Canada in 1862 because their mother-state was providing aid to America’s own attempted breakaway republic
•Allowing foreign insurgents to stage in Minnesota and perpetrate multiple massive cross-border terrorist attacks into Canada between 1866 and 1871 resulting in hundreds of deaths
•Invading Mexico in 1913 to try to rendition a high value target that perpetrated a cross-border terrorist attack against the US
•Seizing the port of Veracruz in Mexico in 1912 to ensure access by military shipping
•Stationing numerous troops and military facilities in Canada
•Extracting trade concessions from both Canada and Mexico
ABigGuy4U
2d ago
But it's also hard to square that with the Zelensky of today asking for every weapon under the sun, wanting to make zero territorial concessions, and even "retake" Crimea which was only ever Ukraine's on paper.
It’s pretty easy to square when you notice that the hardliners in the SBU started killing anyone trying to make peace. Zelensky had two choices: relentlessly prosecute the war himself, or get shot in the head by a “Russian assassin” and have someone else relentlessly prosecute the war in the name of his heroic martyrdom.
ABigGuy4U
2d ago
The bigger problem is that foreign policy stays exactly the same regardless of who is President. Clinton, Bush II, Obama and Trump all wanted détente with Russia. And yet, the State Department undermined all of them and continued pursuing its own aims of unlimited hostility and NATO expansion.
ABigGuy4U
2d ago
Overall I think you’re right, but I suspect he took the CIA’s warnings a lot more seriously than he let on, and was just messaging that way in public to prevent panic.
ABigGuy4U
2d ago
It really doesn’t feel like they anticipated or were preparing for a war though. It took them four months of panicking and hand-wringing before the first substantial aid packages started to arrive.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
Because they are in demographic decline and they’re thinking about how they are going to defend their border 40 years from now.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
Until they decide they would rather not get frog-marched off to die in a trench in Ukraine and decide that Tiocfaidh ár lá might in fact refer to today.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
If you’re unfamiliar with the idiom, “nice work if you can get it” carries with it the sly implication that said work would be nigh-impossible or at least very difficult to get.
I’m on record here several times saying that I think it was a stupid plan because of its high likelihood of backfiring. I think if they were going to try to pull it off, it would have best to do it sometime back when Alanis Morrisette and overly baggy jeans were still popular.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
I’d file it under “nice work, if you can get it”. If they had gotten Ukraine into NATO as a fait-accompli, I think it would have been a good move, and would leave the alliance in a pretty rock solid strategic position over the years. But the State Department badly misjudged Russia’s temperament and now they’re throwing money down a hole and having to contemplate a war that they are under-armed to fight.
Poland's conventional forces won't be much good if Russia starts vaporizing them and demanding unconditional surrender, trusting that France and Britain won't risk their own infrastructure.
I think that’s a scenario that Europe needs to think about hard given that a lot of old Soviet war plans (like Seven Days to the Rhine) explicitly call for massive nuclear strikes on peripheral NATO countries while avoiding nuclear strikes on Britain and France to give them an out. As for your irradiated Polish clay point, there are pretty good strategic reasons to seize the Baltic States and Poland, that’s what gets them the Sulwaki Gap choke point, probably Russia’s most logical post-GDR defensive barrier against NATO.
Regarding your last point, most Western European countries might have serious internal stability problems calling up huge conscript armies, given the religious and ethnic demographic makeup of the military aged males they would be arming.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
I’m not a huge fan of Taylor Swift, but all your criticisms of her are ones that could be and were made about the Beatles when they were popular. The Beatles are only artistic giants now because of fifty years of Boomer propaganda.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
Yeah, we associate Creedence Clearwater Revival and Buffalo Springfield with the Vietnam War now because Boomer liberal filmmakers intentionally cultivated that association.
That’s the point Kubrick was making in Full Metal Jacket when he set the Battle of Hue scene to Surfin’ Bird ie the forgotten, low artistic value bubblegum crap that was actually at the top of the charts in 1968. Not the historical hindsight classics like CCR and the Doors.
ABigGuy4U
4d ago
Given what I could find for Chinese movie theater ticket prices, it would mean around 200 million people saw it. Whether that’s unrealistic given the Chinese movie-going public, I wouldn’t know. Although it does seem like there were pretty big audiences in countries that have large numbers of Chinese expats like Australia too. I don’t know if that’s included in the 1.6 B figure.
ABigGuy4U
4d ago
There are only about 120 recorded deaths per year from starvation in America during the Great Depression. Pellagra and other nutritional deficiency diseases were already endemic in parts of the country even before the Great Depression. In North Carolina alone in 1929 there were an estimated 23,000 malnourished school-age children. There were a lot of malnourishment-related deaths from disease during the Great Depression that, had they occurred in any other country, historians would probably count as famine deaths.
ABigGuy4U
6d ago
Turns out that there is no deep state waiting with sharp fangs and CIA assassins to stop the orange man as soon as he tries to actually do anything that hurts the Blob.
You know, putting aside the between two and five times they actually did try to kill him. And the eight or nine times they tried to throw him in jail. And the massive series of riots that for a hot minute looked like an actual state-sponsored color revolution (open source intel people were making only-half-joking control maps of Portland).
ABigGuy4U
7d ago
HBO’s Chernobyl miniseries does a great job at this. It’s a lightly fictionalized docudrama about a real event, but it feels like a cosmic horror story. And it really nails the feelings you mention, to the point that you actually start to feel your stomach drop every time you see the reactor. I’m sure many of the people here can point to errors in accuracy or history that it made, but as a work of horror fiction it’s just great.
Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to want to do look more like? I do not think it is possible to look more like insofar as having to decide even how to look, the being so far is not even decided by the looking more like, but rather a sense of deciding while looking more like would go so far as a whole. A good example of this is when the man for the McDonalds asked and had the mayonnaise and the employee when and the put on the side burger and not when how when the picture was taken it was mayonnaise and the McDonald's.
One thing I think everyone forgets about the excesses of the early Soviet Union was that this was a polity that already had a long history of severe political repression and extreme political violence. It wasn’t some paradisal democratic wonderland that was suddenly plunged into horror after the revolution. The gulag archipelago, the secret police hauling people off in the middle of the night, the mass executions, the periodic famines— that already existed under the Tsar and had existed for hundreds of years. Stalin was definitely worse than the Tsar, but it was a difference in degree not a difference in kind.
Nazi Germany is bit closer than Russia to the nightmare scenario these people are contemplating, but they forget that Germany had been a monarchy until about 15 years before the Nazis took power, and had about as many internalized democratic norms as post-2003 invasion Iraq. Also the Weimar Republic had been constantly under siege from various stripes of illiberal movements since it’s inception, the first occurring in 1919.
Probably the closest actual analog for democratic backsliding in the US is ancient Republican Rome, but they intentionally don’t want to think about that one because it would require meditating on uncomfortable truths. Yes, Caesar killed the Republic in the end, but he was only able to do that because the Optimate oligarchs had been slowly strangling it for the last 150 years, and had been turfing out the native labor force in favor of foreigners that had fewer legal rights and therefore cost less to work.
Radical Islam is already running wild in Africa and getting worse by the day, partly because of how ineffective US military aid is. African countries have already been turning away from the United States by the dozen because of the US’s inability to help them fight it. America’s help is weak and ineffective partially because the aid is conditioned on a bunch of stupid aesthetic requirements like “respecting bizarre western sexual practices” and “not being a military dictatorship”. The Russians and the Chinese don’t make these totalizing demands. They are more than happy to trade guns and effective military advisors for mineral rights on a transactional basis. The Africans like that better because relationships with Russia and China, while mercenary, actually allow the Africans to govern their own countries and don’t turn into a clingy codependency where they have to live and rule according to what makes American liberals feel good.
ABigGuy4U
11d ago
I’m increasingly starting to believe that counting famine deaths as murders is epistemological hogwash. If we’re going to blame Mao and Stalin for their famine deaths, then we need to blame Churchill for the Bengali terror famine, Prime Minister John Russell for the Irish Holodomor, and Franklin Roosevelt for maiming 2 million Americans with pellagra during the Great Depression. And in all three of those examples you can point to sketch things that make them look intentional. During the Irish famine, the British government was actively taking food out of Ireland for export even while people were dying, they refused to allow American foreign aid to Ireland (just like Stalin did), and various British thinkers and high-ups were muttering darkly about how fewer Irish was probably a good thing. Churchill specifically routed supplies away from India claiming it was necessary for war reasons. Roosevelt was paying American farmers to burn entire crops while people went hungry.
Booooo, you whore.
More options
Context Copy link