georgioz
7d ago
Just a random thing, Pompey has to be one of the most egregious exonyms ever. We are talking about Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, one of the most powerful and famous Romans in history. Pompey sounds more like a name of your neighbor's chihuahua.
georgioz
9d ago
I see this somewhat regularly and I really dislike this style of comment
get a grip! You aren’t fighting a war
you’re rallying for a cause. But in reality these issues are often not as polarized in the public as you might think.
It is interesting how self-unaware this comment is. You are doing what you incorrectly accuse the OP of - only worse.
georgioz
9d ago
There was an interesting article about that in Foreign Affairs. The relevant excerpt here:
The undoing of modernization through its principal process—the coming apart of formal employment and of the rise of precaritization—is the root of the whole phenomenon of “Brazilianization”: growing inequality, oligarchy, the privatization of wealth and social space, and a declining middle class. Its spatial, urban dimension is its most visible manifestation, with the development of gentrified city centers and the excluded pushed to the periphery.
In political terms, Brazilianization means patrimonialism, clientelism, and corruption. Rather than see these as aberrations, we should understand them as the normal state of politics when widely shared economic progress is not available, and the socialist Left cannot act as a countervailing force. It was the industrial proletariat and socialist politics that kept liberalism honest, and prevented elites from instrumentalizing the state for their own interests.
The “revolt of the elites”—their escape from society, physically into heavily guarded private spaces, economically into the realm of global finance, politically into anti-democratic arrangements that outsource responsibility and inhibit accountability—has created hollowed-out neoliberal states. These are polities closed to popular pressures but open to those with the resources and networks to directly influence politics. The practical consequence is not just corruption, but also states lacking the capacity to undertake any long-range developmental policies—even basic ones that might advance economic growth, such as the easing of regional inequalities. State failure in the pandemic is only the most flagrant recent example.
To add my two cents, this idea is about turning Western world into cycle of elitist/populist cycles which entrench corruption and oligarchy in place. Imagine a world where every single person in your country is corrupt - from lowly nurse or police officers to supreme judges and presidents. Everybody accepts this as a new normal, the way to move forward is to accept this and move in cutthroat environment toward wealth and power. If you don't have it, you cheat and corrupt and do whatever is necessary to attain it. If you have it, you defend with all your might - ranging from creating gated communities, crushing lowlifes under your boot to propagandizing and using social status to make yourself look good. Imagine that the whole country is full of Vito Corleones from Godfather: ruthless power hungry thug who is "respected" in local community for his strenght and directed "charity" which helps his power.
And the point is that it is even hard to see Vito Corleone as a "bad guy". He is just product of his Brazilian surroundings, he may see himself as a hero of Kolmogorov complicity type of a problem.
georgioz
9d ago
In what sense is this a collateral damage? It is not as if the government wants to send an airstrike for military installation and kills an innocent janitor. They are defunding a corrupt organization and money spent are saved. In fact I would say that the DEI and grift is the airstrike in question, it is those corrupt people who in their greed caused people to suffer now.
As an analogy - basically all the companies have some sort of charity pledge to send 1% of the profit from a good you buy to spend on saving poor children in Africa. So if you personally decide no longer to buy that product, are you an evil man who just collaterally damaged kids?
georgioz
15d ago
Liberalism indeed is in dire straights. The continental liberalism in tradition of Rousseau was proven to be easy target for subversion by progressive/woke or even worse leftist thought. Hell, look at what happened during the latest convention selecting presidential candidate of libertarian party in USA. The classical liberal outlook was basically frozen in time with latest true champion being John Stuart Mill. It is seriously outdated and did not update its concept to many modern challenges for example what to do about the digital revolution: are your personal data your private property in the old term? What to do about monopolies providing goods and services via subscription models accompanied with uncomprehensive sets of user agreements?
Nevertheless I do have sympathy for James Lindsay, he at least acknowledges all these problems.
his isn't really happening with "woke", especially now.
This is patently false. You could spend a few seconds and go to wiki page for Woke to see that unlike neoliberalism, woke as a term was used since 2010 as
Beginning in the 2010s, it came to be used by activists themselves to refer to a broader awareness of social inequalities such as racial injustice, sexism, and denial of LGBTQ rights.
You have a photo of United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development holding the T-Shirt "stay Woke". Also from the top of my head I remember a story of how Elon Musk discovered Stay Woke T-Shirts after he took over Twitter. The reason why woke was used by activists is that it actually relates to concept of critical consciousness, meaning that this person is awoken to various injustuces especially related to race, sex, sexuality, gender, body types etc. It perfectly encapsulates what the ideology is about.
Paradoxically changing history and usurping power of how words are defined is one of the hallmarks of the ideology. As an example after DEI got a bad reputation, many people just renamed themselves into something like belonging or community management. I do not see a reason why anybody should tolerate this. People know what woke is as a general term, there is no need to stop using the term just because woke people want to make a PR rebranding. For instance given your example, please stop using the term neoliberalism, it is just a slur. Just use a new term such as promoting prosperity.
georgioz
23d ago
NGO is UNspeak for any organisation which is neither controlled by government nor a for-profit business. Your local golf club is an NGO.
Not exactly. You have governments using NGOs as part of their own operations. For instance crown prince Mohammad Bin Salman funds MiSK Foundation which in turn funds many activities either directly or indirectly. Similarly Chinese govenment funds Confucius Institute which is one of the web of organizations working under United Front umbrella to project soft power of Chinese government.
georgioz
25d ago
See, this is the point of many of these ideologies that divide people into the groups and believe in some divine struggle. They need to portrait the enemy as very powerful and almost impossible force to counter, which puts them squarely into the victim category. But at the same time they need to provide some alternative and make their side of the conflict as powerful enough to overcome that adversity. It reminds me of the old joke:
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It is 1935 and Kohn and Goldberg are taking a tram in Berlin. And Kohn sees that Goldberg is reading the latest issue of Der Angriff
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Kohn: Hey, why are you reading that Nazi slop?
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Goldberg: We are hounded all the time, our businesses are confiscated and I feel all powerless. This is the only place where I can read how Jews are awesome and how they actually control everything. It keeps my spirits high.
georgioz
25d ago
If I may suggest, instead of defining fascism - which is quite a contentious concept, try defining neoliberalism. The history of the term - unlike woke - is actually an exonym and yet it is used all the time.
There is something to the concept of the "woke right". To simplify, they accept all the woke theories, but just switch the morality on its head - sometimes trying to even to flip the narrative of oppression. Yes, men did form patriarchy to oppress women and it was is a good thing - just look how shit the world looks like when they rule now. We should go back and repeal the 19th. Yes white supremacy is the boogeyman that woke activists describe. And we can become powerful again and rule the world, even woke people envy that power and want to take it for themselves. Why give them that?
This was always the problem with any victim-victimized ideology, especially if it wins the culture war: why assume that people will sympathize with victims? It is just slave morality, embrace the narrative and reclaim the power from the rabble.
georgioz
29d ago
Exactly, the world problematic itself has a special meaning at least in Foucaultian analysis, which is also often used in "woke" - you take something and "problematicize" it - analyze it for power relation stemming from ideology. It is very similar to this critical approach, something like:
- Define woke.
- Woke is X.
- Ah, I find your definition problematic. Why are you defining it that way, did you consider that you may hate women and black people?
This can be used for anything. Hiking is problematic and racist. Gyms are sexist nests of manspreading and mansplaining etc.
Naraburns probably said it the best, including how this question of "define woke" is often used as a trolling technique to derail discussion. In fact these rhetorical techniques are often very useful to certain strains of woke, as naraburns said woke stems from so called Critical Theory, which functions best when it is well - criticizing - as opposed to explaining. So using some form of rhetorical judo in discussions is used quite often to have opponents on back foot and in defense, where they are the ones asking questions and criticizing all answers. While at the same time they do not subject their own terms to the same scrutiny.
Two can play the same game of gish gallop: define racism, define systemic racism, define whiteness, define white supremacy, define heteronormativity, define gender etc. We can also play the same game with much older terms such as: define capitalism, define socialism, define communism, define neoliberalism. All of these can and were used as "boogeymen", however they continue to be used and they capture something.
georgioz
1mo ago
Is there really such a big difference between selling your body directly to an overweight German, or selling your body to the factory that makes his BMW?
Yes, the former is degenerate and immoral behavior, while the later is virtuous and praiseworthy. This is very easy to discern to anybody who adheres to any form of virtue ethics, such as let's say stoics, who praised temperance, justice, prudence and fortitude. This is similar to Christian virtue ethics which praises chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, kindness, patience, and humility while abhors pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth.
Contrary to what many think, the man is not a nihilist. Rather, I think he believes that we derive most of our meaning in life from our personal relationships, and from Romance in particular.
Interesting take. But just a couple of sentences above you wrote that:
Young men don’t want to be alone in their room jerking off to a computer screen, but society doesn’t present them with many other options for romantic connection. And the problem is getting worse.
The ultimate "meaning" can be found in Romance with big R, but society™ gets in the way. Which calls for even greater meaning, the greater utilitarian socialist good - we need The Revolution and rework the society so everybody can find their own meaning. How surprising.
georgioz
1mo ago
Agreed. Malazan is confusing pile of trash with hundreds and hundreds of characters often from other continents randomly introduced in the middle of completely different storylines without rhyme or reason. It also suffers from large number of "deus ex machina" tropes, where some unbelievably powerful monster shows up randomly doing some stuff that devalues and negates books worth of effort of other characters.
I do not understand this whole discussion about daylight, mostly because how huge the timezones are. As an example the sunlight difference for Central European Time (UTC+1) timezone is around two hours - so as I write this the sunrise in Northern Macedonia is around 6:50 AM while in Northwestern Spain it is 9:00 AM. Even difference between Berlin and Paris is 25 minutes. You will never have ideal amount of sunlight in the morning for the whole timezone, unless you are specifically hunting for a location that suits you specifically. In my experience many countries softly adapted to this, for instance in Spain many people do live till later times, in summer they can have sports matches late in the evening. In the east it is on the other hand normal to have 8-4 or even earlier shifts.
But I agree with you that changing time is actually good for more stability, especially to have more light for whatever time is usual to go to the office in that country. So I am absolutely for keeping time changes twice a year.
georgioz
2mo ago
China doesn’t care about most of the rest of the world.
This is very inaccurate. China has so called Belt and Road initiative which is used to economically influence foreign nations. They have many projects including investing in ports, extraction of natural resources in Africa or influencing South America.
georgioz
2mo ago
Depends on what you mean by theocracy.
I also see this term as well as "separation of church and state" as very confusing. After some deliberation looking into constitution of my country to me theocracy means that the power of government rests in religious institutions. As an example, if local archbishop or some religious council has power to unilaterally declare a new religious public holiday or enforce blasphemy laws, then it is theocracy.
However, this does not mean that people any society where religion has sway is automatically a theocracy. If local church preaches blasphemy laws and general public votes in religious leaders who establish such laws via structure like parliament then it is not a theocracy. To me it is sufficient to have differentiation between government and church structure, not that religious people cannot be part of government implementing their religious ideas.
Paradoxically this is often lost on many secular atheists, who deem anything not in line with their own secular ideology as theocracy. It is just a power move where they want to make secular atheism as reigning state religion preventing other ideas from establishing themselves.
georgioz
2mo ago
I am not Romanian, but we do have paper ballots in Slovakia. And I theorized with my friends for how to possibly influence elections and it seems impossible to me. Some counterpoints to yours based on my own experience in voting comittee:
If you want to stuff ballot boxes without too many accomplices among election officials, hack the system to see who did not vote, plant a false vote and flip the variable next to non-voter name claiming they voted.
This is impossible. The elections are very decentralized, where election rooms are mostly at schools in specific classrooms with election committee consisting of people from various political parties. All eligible voters are automatically registered against their residency and are assigned their specific voting room. All voting is paper based and ballots are handed out against signature. All voting is limited to one day, often Saturday or Sunday with voting rooms closing at 10PM.
What happens next is that all ballots are manually counted with all voting committee members present and having full access to ballots to check them and count them on their own. Final tally is then phoned to central committee, ballot box is then sealed with signatures of all local voting committee participants and relocated by policemen. All participants can take photo of the final tally and they can find it on official government website after elections to check if there was something shady going on.
I am not sure if you are US citizen, but I cannot stress how fucking ridiculous and unsafe your elections are. I dare you to find some way of how to falsify Slovak parliamentary elections just to understand how stupid the voting in US is. The only thing I thought of was some psyop - like planting some free ballot boxes somewhere or maybe bribing some people to declare their own tally did not match in order to attack trust in the voting mechanism or maybe arson of couple of ballot boxes during election day. But I could not think of much more than that.
All these articles about "cranks" to me are just wordgames. Radical/progressive/woke left believes in their own conspiracy theories, the main one is what I call as universal leftist conspiracy - courtesy of James Lindsay. It is really simple:
There are two groups of people: purple and beige. Purple people have access to some special attribute or property - let's call it purpleness. Purple people use this property to oppress beige group. Purpleness also helps purple group to create and reproduce system of purpleness, which reproduces oppression over to the next generation. Liberation from oppression and true equity will only happen if we dismantle the system of purpleness.
This is the most simple and primitive form of conspiracy theory which you can apply to mainstream ideas that for some reason are not considered as low status conspiracies. Some examples:
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There are men and women. Men have access to male privilege which they use to oppress women. This system is called patriarchy and women will never be free unless we dismantle it.
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There are heterosexual people and the rest such as queer people. The former group has ability to define what is normal, they have access to heteronormativity which they use to oppress nonheterosexual people. We will not have true liberation until we will not dismantle it.
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There are white people and the rest, especially Black people. White people have access to whiteness to oppress other races. There can never be true equality until we will not dismantle white supremacy.
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There are capitalists and workers. Capitalists have access to capital and they exclude workers from access to it, reproducing the system of capitalism. There can never be true equality unless oppressed workers have access to means of production which is the first step to dismantle capitalism.
These are all the simplest and crudest forms of conspiracy theory which if applied to anything else would be identified as some uncouth theory only stupid people believe in. Except these conspiracies are high status so they are fine to utter even in a good society. This universal conspiracy can also be applied to many other popular leftist systematic conspiracies, just define new groups and systems of oppression be it handicapped people or fat people or tans people or many more. This type of "analysis" is in my opinion absolute farce, people who believe in these things can identify racism and sexism everywhere - from knitting to hiking. Which is the point - once you are woke to this systemic conspiracy thinking, then you will see sexism, racism and white supremacy even if you see somebody throwing a bugger from his car as he waits on a red light.
By domino strategy: take your own troops and conquer Korea. Take Korean troops and conquer China. Take Chinese troops and conquer the world. A strategy Genghis Khan also used quite successfully with many defections even of Han Chinese generals and troops into his army. Mongol invasions of Japan or Đại Việt were only minority "Mongol" armies with majority fielded by subjected nations,.
Maybe you reacted to dozens of "rude" cues of waiters who want to remove you from the table - after paying the tip of course - so they can sit down somebody else who will consume some more. If you ignore those hints, then the service can get really nasty. Try it sometimes.
Basically all the stereotypes about X or Y European culture being rude/unfriendly/etc. are false.
Interestingly enough, I have exactly the counter view of US culture, especially related to restaurant service. I find US waiters as rude. First they impose themselves upon me as if I care about their name or their stupid questions about where I am from or why am I in the US - as if I cannot tell that they don't give a shit. Then they constantly interrupt me and my friends with inane sales pitches - and if god forbid we go under some invisible sum of $spending per minute, then they actually slam the bill on the table and just kick me out as if I am some hobo. So much for friendliness. To me US waiters are bunch of fake stupid clowns putting on clownshow for US patrons, who for some reason like that shit.
Nevertheless despite this rant, I put up with it when I am overseas and act accordingly with fake smiles and everything - each country has its own thing and US people like their waiters to be clowns for some reason, it is what it is. I am not there to reeducate them about proper continental way of "invisible" manners of waiting staff. But it would be good to have some basic respect for other cultures as well and not take your own manners as the etalon everybody in the world should aspire to. For instance Japanese people are polite, they do not like to be touched and in general like their space. People in Brasil on the other hand love to touch each other, so if somebody comes to me and taps me on my back he means no disrespect or sexual assault or whatnot.
Women are subject to groupthink, but only on surface level. I think it is a strategy of conflict avoidance and reducing negative emotions. But privately they act differently. There are many examples regarding this, just remember the whole "man vs bear" kerfuffle, another example is when women rate each other's looks in public when they give huge bumps even to obviously hideous women. I heard a theory that this is evolutionary strategy, women are more vulnerable and therefore tend to be more "socialistic" for lack of better term - at least on the outside. But privately they are as aggressive and vicious as men especially in social environment, they just have to be careful not to be seen as such. Saying something out loud and then voting differently is prime example of such behavior, similar to being all smiley and warm toward another woman only to "carefully" badmouth her behind her back by using wannabe compliments in game of social status.
I'd guess I'd give current odds as 60-40 for Harris, but this is solely because the online American right spending the final days before the election losing its shit over some squirrel seems like losing type behavior.
I think this is disingenuous way to describe the kerfuffle. It is not about a squirrel, it is so much more. The owner was treated as some kind of criminal, waiting for hours while government agencies raided his home as if he was some member of cartel or something. Also the squirrel we are talking about was a mascot of his nonprofit serving 300 other animals, it was quite famous minor social celebrity with many cute videos. There is so much packed into it besides a cute little squirrel getting killed, it is what its killing represents. There is so much you can read into this: the insane level of licensing, the fact that government probably spent thousands of dollars in mandays of agents investigating and killing some "random" squirrel. It is about facelessness of bureaucracy, where even blunders like these cannot be pinpointed and they just go away as if nothing happened
And it is also about media coverage, including comments like yours here. Which is now standard "why do you care so much about X" response. It is easy to throw back - if some stupid squirrel is so unimportant, why did government went so hard after it? You cannot have it both ways, where on one hand it is just some stupid problem, while at the same time it is a problem that requires probably dozens of people investigating it. So which one is it? If I grant you that it was just some stupid squirrel, then the person in charge of the raid should be automatically fired for mishandling public resources on such a stupid thing, right?
I live in EU and I have different take here. EU is increasingly growing irrelevant on global stage. You can look at it from the perspective of GPD, where the share decreased from 31% of World GDP in 1980 to 15% now. Or you can take it through most successful companies in EU where two out of top 5 EU you just have bunch of luxury apparel companies like LVMH and Hermes or old IT companies like SAP or Accenture representing the IT sector with some pharma companies added. Top 15 top EU companies have less value than Apple with 3,6 trillion market cap.
You can look at it from the perspective of security. EU countries cannot do anything for themselves in this front for last 70 years at least. We could not resolve issues in Yugoslavia, we could not resolve issues in Syria or Lebanon and we cannot do shit in Ukraine. The whole EU cannot even produce the same amount of artillery shells as North Korea.
Culturally EU is dead. In the past there were at least some italian spaghetti westerns, some interesting French movies and music. This is now completely overwhelmed by USA. There is basically nothing produced in EU, the culture is thoroughly US based.
Politically, EU countries are weak as well, it is much worse than in other countries. We now basically have permanent unelected bureaucratic structure with zero legitimacy. Our current President of the European Commission - Ursula von der Layen - is career bureaucrat, she was just a party figure in local German politics. She does not represent shit, most people in EU do not even know she exist. She is a dwarf not even compared to people like Trump or Xi Jinping, she is a dwarf compared to Macron and other elected EU leaders. This whole structure is a joke.
When I am thinking about the whole debacle with Trump, it is just another nail in the coffin. Some people in EU may be surprised, but in reality EU countries are not US allies, we are just vassals. If anything I do actually consider this as a "tough love". In a sense it is liberating to see somebody who actually talks to EU leaders as irrelevant dogs as they are instead of getting pets and platitudes from figures like Obama or Biden, while inevitably going into irrelevancy.
It also opens a very interesting conundrum for many people in Europe, who so far thought of themselves as "The West" or some such. This may even continue if some other countries - especially Germany o France elect more nationalistic governments that will try to forge their own path in the world. In a sense the whole Russia narrative is just a red herring. It is the topic of this decade, but there are other heavy-weights: India, China, Turkey or some up-and-coming countries which may have increased importance in upcoming decades such as Nigeria. European countries will have different geopolitical goals even compared to one another - like when Germans were cozying up to Putin for decades despite many warnings from other countries like Poland - until he was suddenly a bad guy. But there will be different goals compared to these other great powers or superpowers.
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