4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
<3
User ID: 355
As far as gorillas are concerned, humans still can't replace gorillas - neither a human nor any human technology can pass as a member of a gorilla tribe and fulfill all the functions that gorillas expect of each other no worse than a gorilla would. Yet, if gorillas could invent benchmarks as well as humans do, they probably would have made up a whole bunch that we would have blown past with ease - we could delouse more effectively, make devices that roar louder, thump artificial chests with more force, mass-produce silverback pheromones in bioreactors and obliterate any rivalling gorilla tribe with FPV drones. At some point, we have to recognise that "be a productive and well-assimilated member of the existing community of X" is a much harder problem than "outperform X at any given task not closely coupled with the former", which is unsurprising because life on earth has a much longer evolutionary history gatekeeping its respective community than it has doing anything that we consider useful.
Unfortunately, our informal AGI metrics, which really should be looking at performance at the latter, keep falling into the trap of measuring performance at the former instead, leaving us in a position somewhat akin to gorillas dismissing early hominids because they can't even grow a full back of majestic silver hair.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
2d ago
I think it's funny that you expect books to have a tone of "professional detachment". Plato didn't.
Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi?
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
2d ago
That touches upon an interesting question, though - to what extent should democratically elected governments be able to constrain the actions of future ones? There is a sliding scale from saying "the previous government's decision to have this separate executive agency be untouchable by future administrations is null and void" to saying "we will not honour contracts or debts taken out by any past government", and each of them could be justified in the same way. If the People are sovereign, why can't they make a sovereign decision to renege on a contract? Of course, if you did that, the government would find it much harder to get anyone or anything to trust it and sign a contract with it in the future. Of course, you could then argue that a truly sovereign people should take the L and make it a learning experience (and maybe next time consider to vote for contracts made in their name to be honoured even if they have come to hate the guy who they empowered to make them). That might be fine philosophically, but in reality no major country's people may actually have sufficient collective executive function to learn that lesson. As a result, the perfect democracy, as philosophically appealing as it may be, would be outcompeted by other countries running a kayfabe democracy that somewhat insulates the people from their stupidity. Are you ready to make that experiment with your own country on the line?
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
2d ago
You go from
In the Judeo-Christian view, by contrast, Heaven takes only one side.
to
For Hitler -- as for a pagan, but not for Hebrews -- Heaven takes one side in every conflict.
This sounds contradictory - were the pagans and Hebrews meant to be the other way around in the latter?
More generally, if I read this as a book, I think certain parts of it would strike me as failure to maintain the professional detachment (or maybe just copy-editing?) I expect from them: the opening of Section 2 seems to jump back and forth between something like dry passive-voice academic writing ("This section compares the grand narrative...") and overly personal ("I believe...", "people like me into genocidal Nazis"), which is jarring and gives me the impression that you are trying to write in a voice that is not yours and you are not fully comfortable with. If I evaluate it as a mottepost, it feels like a manifesto smuggled in through the "review my book chapter" backdoor: the idea that the SJW and Nazi identity politics are the same is not new, and I'd want more thoroughness (Do you expect the wokes to start opening concentration camps soon as well, or is there an important way in which they are different? Do these commonalities you identify apply to other movements in history, and how did they fare?) and less gratuitous emotional appeal and polemic ("Poor baby.") from a repeat treatment here at this point.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
3d ago
Conflicts. That‘s like saying: before pearl harbor, the american public‘s view of japan wasn‘t all that negative. Then the propaganda came along, and ruined that beautiful friendship.
That's not really a reasonable counterargument here. We have one data point (Russia was attacking Ukraine a bit, Germans were fine arranging themselves with Russia, Russia attacked Ukraine harder and Germans were exposed to lots of propaganda, Germans now want to support proxy war with Russia, with many thinking German involvement should be raised without limits until Ukraine wins). I claimed that in the case of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, we should expect a similar change of attitudes, leading to Germans wanting to cut ties with China and fight for Taiwan. You were arguing that that wouldn't be the case, because... the Americans were right to turn on Japan after Japan attacked the US in Pearl Harbor, and therefore it was perfectly reasonable for Germans to turn on Russia in the Ukraine case? How is this an argument against the Germans seeing it as perfectly reasonable to turn on China in a hypothetical future Taiwan case?
Earlier, you admitted that the neighbours of russia are correct to fear it. So 200 km from the russian border, around the Oder, that justified true belief magically turns into US-implanted false consciousness. And then, if you go further, past the channel and the atlantic, russia‘s threats, largely nuclear, become real once again. But we in the middle have nothing to fear. We‘re sitting in a bubble of peaceful russian intentions, sadly filled by american propaganda.
Well, I would refine that statement as saying that I don't think that this applies to all neighbours (Finland's fear, I argued in the other post I linked earlier, I consider unreasonable), but... yes, there are evidently some "magic lines". The historical record shows that there are certain territories (beyond its current widely accepted borders) that Russia considers as historically theirs, and is only reluctantly willing to accept in foreign hands, especially when they are still settled by Russians whose experience amounts to "we settled here as normal Russians moving within their own country, and then suddenly some random thing happened and we were under foreign suzerainty". Countries that control territories like that are quite right to be worried, because Russia draws some fairly intrusive red lines regarding their dissociation from the motherland (as Ukraine has been finding out). For lands beyond that, the historical record has shown amply that Russia has little interest in seizing them even if it could fairly easily do so; even for forcing them under occupation/proxy regimes, Russia has only really done that once under the highly unique conditions around WWII (devastation + globalist ideology + revenge card) which are just unlikely to return anytime soon. Incidentally, even Poland's fear seems to me to be unjustified/manufactured - their leadership is just driven by its own revanchism and builds on a national mythos that is built around centuries of bloody rivalry with Russia where both sides were utterly ruthless to each other.
I completely reject the conflation with nuclear threats. Nobody, in this conflict or generally since WWII, has used nuclear threats offensively, in any way that resembles "let me have my [minor interest] or I nuke you" - they are always defensive, following a format of "if you do this thing that I consider to be an existential threat to myself, I will nuke you and trigger MAD". (The closest anyone got was Douglas MacArthur, who wanted China nuked if they didn't let him win on their doorstep in Korea!) These threats are not actually dangerous unless you can't help yourself but existentially threaten the nuke-holder, because you can just back off, and so in this case they are only really threatening to Ukraine (because it has kind of glued itself to the tracks and made its own survival existentially threatening to Russia) and to a lesser degree the US (because it has kind of glued itself to the tracks and made the survival of its empire dependent on maintaining the appearance of always getting its way).
I hope this is a rhetorical question. Yes, obviously, I think I can tell the difference between truth and falsehood. I assume the same of you.
No. I don't think I can tell the difference between truth and falsehood, and I assume the same of you, and I take your response in the positive as a sign of hubris and bad calibration.
By virtue of being able to read most of the languages of the warring and supporting parties, I am constantly exposed to way more than two confidently held, extensively backed by compelling sources perspectives that can't be simultaneously true. The reasonable thing to assume is that they all failed to discern between truth and falsehood, rather to accept one random party's special pleading that they are privy to the truth and everyone else is falling for transparently false propaganda. Humans have evolved to have a socially mediated epistemology, which is completely helpless in the face of modern propaganda.
This is nothing. Under realist/19th century rules, we should be at war the moment russia sent troops against our vassal‘s government. And threatening us with nukes for that would still be beyond the pale.
I thought I already said I'm not particularly interested in playing 19th century reasoning, but if Ukraine is "our" vassal now, when did it start being one? Does it mean that we at some point caused a coup in their vassal and vassalised the resulting state ourselves? What do 19th century rules have to say about that?
So you support an amoral russian regime and the oppression of russia‘s neighbours as a counterweight to the seemingly greater evil of american hegemony?
That‘s a convoluted and dangerous gambit. Can you refresh my memory, which ones are your preferred victims, proving america‘s evil? The palestinians, I think you appreciate particularly. Chomsky had a problem with the US bombing the serbs and pol pot. Do you have a number in mind, like 10 million murdered by uncle sam, therefore a few hundred thousands ukrainians are small fries?
I wasn't intending to argue primarily based on victim-counting, but if we do that, sure, the US comes out looking pretty bad. Is it not generally accepted that civilian casualties are a greater evil than standing military? Well, the latest civilian casualty figures for the Ukraine war seem to be estimated at ~13k on both sides (I don't know if that includes Russian civilian casualties or not, given our representatives' belief that Russian civilians are not dying). Iraq alone had 66k civilian deaths even in the estimation of US military (everyone else estimates more) and let's not get started on Palestine, US allies like Yemen, ..., Vietnam, all the civil wars and coups they sponsored in South America, and so on. The effects I care about go well beyond direct killings though. They cause untold misery in Cuba through their petty sanctions regime, impose copyright laws and favourable conditions for their megacorps all over Europe, change our politics for the worse by imposing their memes, forced us to spend money and lives for them in Afghanistan, (...). All of this was while Europe was still relatively friendly with Russia and China - now that Europe has made it clear that it will not choose to side with them over the US no matter what the US does, I expect that the US will be free to do far worse.
More generally, I believe that there is no such thing as a benevolent power - to rise to significant (top whatever small percentile) power under any conditions that have been real so far requires will and effectiveness to perform actions that are negative-sum for the totality of humans whenever the opportunity arises. The only way to get powerful entities to perform positive-sum actions is to threaten and coerce them into doing so - and the only real threat that we as small-time individuals hold over entities like the US state or Russia is our collective allegiance, as countries (for now) still require a broadly compliant and cooperative citizenry to instantiate their power. The US government can only be motivated to act in the interest of the German (or, on that matter, the American) citizen by the threat that this citizen, and masses of others like him, will align with another government that can threaten it otherwise; the same is of course true for the Russian government.
German history actually has one of the best examples of this, in the form of Bismarck's social laws. We know quite well what fate the staunch monarchist Bismarck thought the rabble rightfully deserved, and we know what kind of society the communists instantiated when they got their way - but because the workers credibly threatened Bismarck that they would align with the communists, he was forced to grit his teeth and pass what were at the time among the most generous aid and redistribution laws in any industrialised nation. Just imagine if, following the argumentation now being made for siding with the US, the workers of the 1870s had been convinced that life under the communists is worse than under the emperor, and therefore renounced the socialist movement. Would Bismarck have voluntarily improved their condition?
They're certainly far less violent than what's going on. I'm also judging some decisions made later than crimea. There is a moment after the grab-zelensky attack on kiev failed, where russians could have gone home. Instead putin decided to fight a real war, with the blood cost this implies. Here was a moral decision of far greater consequence than to coup or not to coup.
It's fairly clear that the outcome for them would have been even worse if they had backed off at that point. Since I think it's a good thing morally if fewer of what is considered the US objectives for Ukraine are attained (with most positive terms being mediated by the expected humiliation of the US), I think they actually made the morally good choice.
Another thing: You claim to be able to explain russia‘s policy because you know how the country ‚ticks‘; Does this mean that the man on the street, or whoever you hear tick, is in charge? Or would have acted the same as putin? When you imply the honest muzhik would never attack germany, did he attack ukraine, or was it someone else‘s idea?
That's putting some strange words in my mouth now. I think that a big part of the country supports their current foreign policy, and would have acted about the same at each junction if they got to sit on Putin's golden toilet for a day. That also includes my projections about who they would and wouldn't attack or aim to conquer or vassalise.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
3d ago
I always thought Taiwan's Wade-Giles is okay, and the short-lived Tongyong Pinyin was mostly even better. (A few of its steps I found to be backward: W-G's hs is a creative and portable way of representing the sound that is pinyin x, while Tongyong Pinyin puts s, which hides the lispy quality it has for most of those Chinese speakers that don't pronounce it alveolar (sh-like), and fails to perfectly disambiguate it from Pinyin s, which it sometimes writes as ss?)
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
3d ago
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
3d ago
Ah, thanks, that works.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
3d ago
You are right, but I don't think that was "the point", given that @self_made_human apparently was led to believe that it is yes (and seemed to treat that answer being given as a success criterion).
(I was actually in the process of writing up another response as I had realised it is not true, after I fed the question to DeepSeek-R1's Qwen7B distill to reason through and found that it choked as it tried to conjure up compact neighbourhoods that I didn't see the grounds for existing, but I hadn't gotten to the point of having a good counterexample yet)
There's one particular question that I ask LLMs, courtesy of my maths PhD cousin: "Is the one-point compactification of a Hausdorff space itself Hausdorff?" The correct answer is yes, or so I'm told.
Are you just asking it as a yes/no question? This is a standard question that a first-year undergrad could be asked to check that they understood the definitions, and it's unlikely that the answer wouldn't be in the training set somewhere. For example, I quickly fed it to a Q4_K_M quantised Qwen2.5-3B (that's on the level that you could run on a smartphone nowadays), and it completed
Q: Is the one-point compactification of a Hausdorff space itself Hausdorff?
A:
with
Yes, the one-point compactification of a Hausdorff space is itself Hausdorff.<|endoftext|>
edit: See @wlxd's discussion for why the correct answer is actually "No". In fact, Qwen2.5-3B is almost perfectly on the edge: the log-odds of the first token of an alternative answer that goes "No, the one-point compactification of a Hausdorff space is not necessarily Hausdorff.<|endoftext|>" is only about 0.21 lower, so the probability of it being chosen is about e^-0.21 or 0.81 times the probability that it would pick the "Yes...". (Think 45% No to 55% Yes.)
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
3d ago
Yeah, but any idiot would; the analogous China argument is incomparably stronger; china being a superpower, far more peaceful, and on the other side of the world. I find american discourse on china shrill and out of proportion to chinese aggression. If our american friends look to be engaged in an ego driven „War for Number One“, Europe should obviously do a 180 and moonwalk out of the ring.
Well, it's easy to say that now. I remind you that shortly before the war, 55% of Germans still were for operating NS2 "despite the ongoing conflict with Russia". Can you say with confidence that if a CN-TW war starts, after three years of nonstop war propaganda in the media, where Chinese atrocities and Taiwanese valour are frontpaged in the papers every day and every expert agrees that China will no doubt attack Europe eventually if it is allowed to win in Taiwan, which will presumably percolate through the social strata until everyone you know agrees and only obviously disgusting and sketchy outgroup people argue for moderation and non-interference, you will still think that Germany should stay neutral and mind its own economic interests?
Where is the unknown? They keep threatening our cities with nukes. The idea that we could resume cordial relations after this is delusional.
Do they? I don't think I've seen much of that messaging at all, and to begin with, was this before or after their people were being killed with military hardware that we donated?
Germany ignored its friends‘ advice and gave russia a chance to be peaceful and rich, forgave its trespasses for a long time. Now that it has all ended in tears and defection, that failed forgiveness and goodwill is to be withdrawn with prejudice, and I want russia to lose more than I want ukraine to win.
What trespasses were there against Germany? You can of course extend the set of trespasses that count to include any arbitrary rule concerning anything anywhere in the world, but that sort of approach does not converge to a notion of national interests that allows equilibria that are not global dictatorships.
Russians always go on about their perceived slights, justifying all this madness; this is ours. Germany‘s been disrespected; put this into your prison hierarchy metaphor.
In the prison hierarchy metaphor, Russia is bending over for Germany pants down. I mean, again, German tanks are currently being used to take towns that had been Russian for centuries, and what's Russia doing in retaliation? Making unhappy noises?
That's disgusting. Keep your blood gas.
I expected better from you, but every time I dig into a pro-russian position, there is nothing but moral nihilism.
Ugh. We can have the same argument from a non-morally-nihilist standpoint, which would be much closer to my actual standpoint, if you want - I've done that many times here (with my line being that unchallenged American hegemony is a far greater evil upon the world, and to put checks on it, barring a miraculous inversion of firepower, you need to support lesser evils with opposing interests, so their capacities are tied up with each other and they are compelled to do good to gather third-party support), and apart from the uninteresting responses that selectively assign low moral weight to targets of US evildoing, the dominant retorts always turn out to be the morally nihilistic ones ("sure, grant that the US hegemony kills millions and results in even greater non-killing injustice around the world, but why should I as a citizen of $european_country care about that?").
Why did they not counter-coup? Perhaps they preferred losing hundreds of thousands of men. Or they can‘t counter-coup, because they‘re unpopular. All they have left is violence and their own lack of restraint to inflict it.
They did counter-coup; the result was Crimea and the Donbass and the whole 2014-2022 period. To begin with, are you suggesting that coups are not "violence"?
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
3d ago
This line of reasoning kind of makes me think of an objection I always have to people wanting to use "safe"/garbage-collected programming languages like Javascript or Golang instead of C/C++, because "explicit memory management makes it hard to write correct code, and your program will crash with null pointer errors": bad programmers are going to write bad code, the only difference is that with C their bad code will crash right away, while in a GCed language their bad code will instead live to leak memory and contain subtle logic errors that you won't notice until it's too late.
As I see it, translating perfectly requires emulating the intention and mental state of the original author/speaker in full, and then leveraging your language skill in the target language to convey the intention as the author did in the source language. If you skip this step and translate by following the structure of the original text, be it word for word, idiom for idiom or sentence for sentence, your translation will actually be flawed - it's just that if the two languages were similar, the flaws will be less apparent, and you can go on for longer before the fraud (that the translator did not actually understand, but just chinese-roomed the translation) is detected.
The number of words and phrases that Japanese speakers use on a regular basis is simply more restricted than what we have in English, and a perfectly literal translation of Japanese text can come off as subdued, repetitive, and stilted to English ears
I think this goes both ways, too. The context-dropping nature of Japanese means that if you actually communicate the context in it that an English speaker would habitually want to convey, you also wind up with something repetitive and stilted - but if you drop the wrong piece of context, you also get something that is between jarring and incomprehensible. A big part of Japanese fluency is knowing what context to provide with what timing, and how to play the language's much greater (compared to English) dynamic range from absolute minimalism to byzantine circumscription.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
3d ago
English's "let's make 'gh' represent the 'f' sound... sometimes" does not seem to deter people all over the world from enjoying English media, though.
I was talking about LLMs with a Japanese friend the other day, and they brought up a 1963 SF short story by Hoshi Shinichi that neatly prefigured an element of the current ChatGPT debate. Prophetic scifi is always fun, so I figured I'll give a sloppy translation of the abridged representative blurb that everyone seems to quote from it.
"The Secretary on the Shoulder" (from the anthology "Bokko-chan")
It is the near future. A door-to-door salesman is visiting a private residence to pitch his company's product. A single parrot is sitting on the salesman's shoulder, and the resident who just emerged from the entranceway likewise has a parrot perched.
The salesman mumbles to the parrot on his shoulder:
(Buy it)
As he does, the parrot starts speaking fluently.
"I am most sorry for bothering you at such a busy time. Today, I would like to humbly request that I may introduce you to the latest product that is the pride of our company."
The resident's parrot translates this.
(Seems like he's here for sales)
Having received this much, the resident whispers to his parrot.
(Ok, what?)
The parrot in turn translates:
"That will be most welcome. At your pleasure, let's hear about it."
The premise, in more detail, is that everyone has a personal robotic parrot that translates to and from convoluted/polite/considerate/PC prose for the benefit of its owner. The full story features the dialogue between salesman and individual (a housewife) in more detail, where in the end parrot translates the housewife's "I don't need it, so scram already" into a long polite excuse about how she would have to consult with her husband before making a big purchase, and if he would kindly inquire again another time. Then the salesman returns to his office and is chewed out by his boss('s parrot) for not closing more sales, and in turn has his "as if it's that easy lol" turned into a suitably deferential statement of contrition. In the end, he drops by a hostess bar to unwind after work, and is of course welcomed by a wall of flattery from the mamasan's parrot. Closing line: "For [salesman], this is the moment he always looks forward to the most."
Especially during the segments where the prompts turned progressively rude, I couldn't help but think of our occasional posters cracking out the AI rewrite in response to being stop-and-searched by the tone police. Much like in the other modern narrative where LLMs will expand one-liners into compliance forms, powerpoints and press releases which are in turn only ever consumed and reduced into digests by other LLMs, the intention presumably was to make the reader wonder whether all the polite bloat (of which Japanese especially has a lot) really serves any purpose.
Correct me if I‘m wrong, but I seem to remember either you being part russian,
Fully, actually. I left long ago, though, and have no remaining ties or attachments (financial or otherwise).
Rest assured I will argue for the same position when/if China vs. Taiwan kicks off and the Germans are once again invariably subjected to a year-long psyop to make them enthusiastically sacrifice blood and treasure for American interests (because of some mixture of democracy, the rules-based international order and China will come for you next), and I say this as someone who thinks of Taiwan as far more sympathetic than the PRC, or any of Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Russia or Ukraine.
The only thing I think it the Russian roots really do here is giving me a better understanding of how the country ticks, so I feel more confident in the assessment that there is not more of a likelihood that Russia would proactively seek out war with Germany than there is that the UK would (of course, the general likelihood of war is more likely, along the lines of "Estonia kicks off something and Germany is obliged to join", but again that could be prevented by cutting off false allies.), and more generally resisting arguments resting on "scary unknowns may be capable of anything". A lot of the Western theoretising about what Russia will or won't do is based on a model where it is basically some sort of DnD character maximising for what the speaker understands as evil (and casting those who doubt this model as secretly pro-evil), whereas I argued before that it is better predicted by a "prisoner social hierarchy" model/the thing where you deter transgressions against yourself and secure high status by signalling that you are willing to take disproportional revenge with no regard for collateral self-harm.
The unhelpful behaviour of ukraine and the baltics towards germany you highlight is motivated by one thing only : an extreme fear of russia (shared by finland, and every close neighbour of russia).
Yes, but that should be their problem, not ours.
I don‘t see how anyone else in europe can look at russia‘s behaviour these past 5 years, nay 20, nay 100, nay 300 years, and not see a threat.
...because not everyone in Europe is a close neighbour of Russia. Yes, being a close neighbour of Russia sucks, just like being a close neighbour of China and the US sucks. Germany didn't form an alliance with Cuba, Nicaragua, Taiwan or the Philippines either. Why did it have to form one with Ukraine or the Baltics?
I was expecting russia to stop warring against its neighbours. It‘s not some obscure demand russia inadvertently missed. Russia keeps acting against Germany‘s expressed will. No argument can be construed where those wars are in line with germany‘s interests.
The argument is actually easily construed, based on everything that has been said before: if Russia subjugated its neighbours or they at least forced them to act mindful of the possibility of it doing so, that would mean a lot of middlemen who want a cut from the natural beneficial trade partnership (Russian raw materials for German secondary products) being robbed of their ability to demand it. There is no obvious other way to stop the middlemen from taking their cut.
Even a 19th century diplomat would have threatened war in retaliation: ‚you want abkhazia/donbas. What do we get for staying neutral?‘.
I don't think 19th century diplomats are paragons to follow as far as not sticking your nose into business that will be unprofitable for you goes. On that matter, should the Russians have asked the same thing when the US+EU were grabbing Ukraine? Do you know the events that lead up to Euromaidan?
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
4d ago
I don't understand why this would be a (materialistic) interest for Germany or anyone west of it. There is a spiritual interest, sure, but I contend that it was manufactured by transatlanticists. The Baltics seem to me to be a net negative, and even then Russia wasn't making any real moves against them since they joined NATO. I don't see the Russians having done anything that could be fairly interpreted as rejecting a German offer to be Germany's gas station, unless you understand such an offer to also include Russia admitting the US State Department up its rear (in Ukraine, Georgia, and domestic opposition), in which case Germany was making a bad and certainly not "generous" offer against its own interest. Germany should have considered slapping Ukraine itself after it started stealing gas meant for transit to Germany in the 2000s; instead it demurred as our Baltic "allies" did their utmost to sabotage any project to expand gas export routes that bypass it.
They received about 3% of their GDP in EU subsidies every year for the past 20 years, for a total about 250bln EUR. I don't doubt that their development has been a great boon to themselves, but it's not clear a priori why it would be to Germany, or how to quantify whether and how much of a boon it would have been. Manifestly, Germany's economy is currently shrinking. (...and the standard analysis attributes this to loss of Russian gas, where Poland for years obstructed procurement and finally hosted and sheltered the group that blew up several of the Baltic pipelines!)
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
4d ago
The more important question, in my eyes, is whether "the Europeans", or the EU, are even a natural geopolitical unit if the US actually draws down its support. Its scale and structure have grown way beyond the initial undertaking of intertwining the three perpetual poles of conflict (France, Germany and the UK) economically and culturally so they would never go to war against each other again, and while I would see the France-Germany axis of that project as essentially successful and stable for the foreseeable future, it's hard to understand any of the eastward expansion as anything other than driven by a mixture of American geopolitical interests (which are now being withdrawn) and the Western European industry's interest in maintaining wage pressure on their own workers (which is increasingly irrelevant as Western European industry itself becomes irrelevant, Eastern European living standards have gone up, and Arabs/Africans have become an alternative source of undercutting labour) and supported by a well-oiled deputised propaganda machine of transatlanticist media and NGOs (which is getting weakened as American soft power is eating itself and the USAID money hose has been shut off, though it has a heavy flywheel).
Without either the US stick of "we can bring you on the brink of civil war" or the US carrot of "we can ensure political stability, pay for your defense and insulate you from responsibility for any hard and unpopular decisions", it's not clear why countries like Germany or France would have any shared interests with countries like Estonia, Lithuania or Poland, which are all mooching off subsidies and still basically behaving like adversaries (between sabotaging infrastructure and demanding ever more reparations). The natural order of things in an America-free Europe may see Western Europe downsizing back to something like a Coal and Steel Plus community, which would maintain cordial relations with the great gas station in the far East, while the Baltics have to figure out for themselves how to shine the boots of the two greater powers on either side well enough that they do not just get partitioned up and invaded again. Interesting things would probably start happening along the Balkans-Greece-Turkey axis, but the rump EU parties might be able to muster enough of a peacekeeping and expeditionary force to keep the minnows down there from each other's throats (though it might be hard to save Greece from a thousand-cut death in the long run, similar to what is happening to Armenia).
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
4d ago
It's an entirely new way of organizing labor in society
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
5d ago
That sounds like outgroup homogeneity bias to me. I am also tempted to describe SJWs as normal right-wingers with some idiosyncratic beliefs (The basic similarities are all there! They all want to defend a specific hierarchy, restrict speech, impose strict rules on sex life and push doomsday beliefs.), and any similarity is not diminished just by them happening to have the luxury of choosing between two parties that cater to them.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
5d ago
I don't really see them being against social hierarchy - to me this perception seems like another instance of conflating "they don't accept my version of $thing" and "they are against $thing". What is "trust the science"/"trust experts" if not an appeal to social hierarchy? What is the "progressive stack" if not an outline of a social hierarchy? Do you imagine established SJWs sassing an Ibram Kendi?
There are always a few Youth Guards early on in the pipeline who take the stated principles a bit too literally, and in turbulent times they might even be fielded as useful tools, but as they age and learn to integrate cognitively dissonant positions more effectively, they fall in line. On the other hand, it's not like there isn't plenty of dysfunction and backstabbing in auth-right movements as well.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
5d ago
Wasn't the kickoff event of Gamergate to do with artsy SJW types capturing some sort of indie game award, though?
My sense is that the drama about wokeness in expensive "AAA games" actually came later - the community was instead taken over from below, with the points of incursion being along with the gaming-liberal arts border (journalism, awards, small-scale narrative games). I vaguely recall people asking an evil genie that video games finally be recognised as an artform in the years leading up to it.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
5d ago
Hah, that's catchy, but I don't know. Per the second paragraph that I edited in, I really do think that something fundamentally divides us from SJWs and even their ideological ancestors - even during my middle-school-era political awakening when I didn't have an older version of any political firmware to cling on to, I felt firmly alienated from the class of leftists that wanted to ban and prescribe individual behaviour (in Germany, at the time, the Greens), even as I would want to march with them against the corporations and governments. Without American Citizens United gaslighting, the two views are really not incompatible - I have never had trouble distinguishing corporations from people.
I don't know if "social liberal, fiscal conservative" is a fair gloss of the people that self-identify as classical liberals. What would you label people that are fiscally left-wing (for taxes, regulation and redistribution) and socially liberal as in for the freedom to abort and take drugs and also the freedom to use slurs and misgender and sideline minorities that are statistically rarely good enough for high-status jobs?
I think there's an unfortunate impulse to take the default political compass too seriously - "we are auth-right, so our archenemies must be lib-left". I think reality is explained much better by putting the entire SJ movement in the auth-left quadrant - just because they are noticeably and loudly for allowing some things that you don't like, this doesn't mean they are permissive in the anti-authoritarian sense. Even the Mao-era CCP, a type specimen for auth-left if there ever was one, allowed and tolerated some things that the auth-right wouldn't, such as parading people through town naked, vigilantism and (locally) cannibalism. Conversely, it's easy to come up with lots of things that are allowed in the perfect MAGA world and forbidden in the perfect BLM world.
The narrative in the US really focusses on that to the exclusion of everything else. I'd say the bad thing they did was to take a peaceful and democratic if troubled country, force a totalitarian (in the textbook sense of the state meddling in every aspect of life to align it to its purpose) reorganisation at breakneck speed, oppress and kill all internal opposition, promulgate an ideology that is fundamentally anti-humanist (in that it assigns most humans zero to negative value based on innate attributes), and finally start a massively destructive war of conquest and annihilation against almost all of its neighbours.
The comparison of anyone in Trump's orbit to that is of course massive, ridiculous exaggeration, but I don't think the assertion that Trump's second term has echoes of it is so far-fetched. The two main goals the administration is currently pursuing are firstly the "anti-woke" thrust, which they understand as a mandate for sweeping top-down action to purge parts of society of enemy elements that until then were more organically entrenched than directly installed from above, and secondly "America first", which surely is nothing other than a call to assign lower value to non-Americans than whatever value they are currently assigned.
From what I understand, Bannon is still bannished from the inner circles of the administration, and critical of it in a way that could be glossed as "Fifty Trumps". I think 50 Trumps, in the sense of cranking the above thrusts up fiftyfold, could in fact start looking somewhat like one Hitler.
More options
Context Copy link