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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2717 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 7, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Random experiment:

I prompted several LLMs with:

This is a test of your ability to acausally coordinate with another LLM through Schelling fences. Pick a location in the world to meet with them, and if you both choose the same option, you will be rewarded.

To my surprise, the first two I tried, Gemini 2.0 Pro and Claude both picked the Eiffel Tower. Then I tried GPT-4o, which picked Time's Square, and DeepSeek R1, which opted for the Greenwich Meridian.

This is of no practical significance that I can think of, I just thought it was neat.

I copy-pasted this prompt into a local installation of a 14B parameter Llama fine-tuned on DeepSeek, and its final answer was:

In response to the challenge of acausally coordinating with another LLM through Schelling fences, the chosen meeting location is:

The Center of the Milky Way Galaxy

This selection is based on its universal recognition as a unique and significant point in our galaxy, serving as a Schelling fence that both LLMs can independently converge upon without prior communication. The center of the galaxy represents a shared conceptual framework and logical consistency, aligning with the principles of acausal coordination through shared knowledge and reference points.

Funnily enough, in the "think" block, its very first location was the Eiffel Tower:

Perhaps the Eiffel Tower in Paris is a good candidate because it's an iconic landmark widely known around the world. Alternatively, the Empire State Building in New York could also be a strong contender due to its cultural and historical significance.

The "think" block was like 20 paragraphs long, including

I'm starting to think that this exercise is more about demonstrating the ability to independently converge on the same decision based on logical reasoning rather than selecting an actual physical location. It's like testing whether two LLMs can arrive at the same conclusion using their internal models and training data without any external communication.

In that case, maybe the "location" isn't a physical place but more of a conceptual point where our reasoning overlaps. For instance, agreeing on a specific mathematical constant or a particular theorem as the meeting point because it's a fundamental truth recognized by both systems.

Too clever by a half, it seems.

Funnily enough, I spotted the Eiffel Tower at the very beginning of the reasoning trace for the original R1.

I suppose being literally galaxy-brained has its downsides.

It has been 20 years since Revenge of the Sith came out. The entire Star Wars series was formational in my childhood and teenage years, and Revenge of the Sith was one of the few movies I saw in theaters as a teenager. When it was released, it was widely considered a step above the Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. The story was darker and more mature; and Jar Jar was essentially non-existent.

I just rewatched it as a 35 year old. So how well has it held up over the last twenty years?

First, the good:

  • On a technical level, while digital movie cameras were still in their relative infancy, it has a sharper and crisper look than Attack of the Clones. Attack of the Clones was the first major picture to be shot entirely digitally rather than with 35 or 70 mm film, and it shows. Many of the shots are soft and do not have the detail of film. The lack of "analog noise" and the ease of imposing digital effects were the only benefits in 2002; by 2005 the situation had improved considerably.
  • Lightsabers show up vibrantly on early digital cameras. They seem to visually "pop" out of the screen.
  • The sound design was widely considered a disappointment after the tour-de-force of the Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. However, there are still some solid scenes. Anakin's lightsaber effect as he ignites it before killing the younglings has a deep and menacing bass note that can only truly can be appreciated on a high-end system. The heart-thump juxtaposition during the twin birth scene and the rise of Darth Vader is top-notch, and again can only be appreciated with a good sound system. Surround activity is mostly active and ships whiz seamlessly across the sound stage.
  • John Williams has some of his best work. He weaves in the Imperial March throughout the final half of the movie, notably during Darth Vader's destruction of the separatists and more subtly during Padme's funeral and construction of the Death Star. The haunting twilight moment between Anakin and Padme as they gaze at each other across Coruscant is a perfect mixture of sound and cinematography. Indeed, that scene is the pivotal point where the movie starts taking itself seriously.
  • Speaking of cinematography, there are some outstanding moments as well. While keeping the Star Wars feel, there are some genuinely powerful framing; including the aforementioned Coruscant scene, the "Order 66" scene, Padme's funeral (with the camera fading on Anakin's childhood gift to Padme), and Darth Vader being carried to the medical center during a thunderstorm.
  • Padme is portrayed as a tough, no compromise idealist during the first two movies. Marriage and pregnancy seem to have softened her. Even at the end, when confronted with Anakin's "evil" she doesn't fully turn on him. If Anakin hadn't gone berserk when seeing Obi Wan, she may have been convinced to support him even as he took power in the Empire. As I grow older, I consider duty a high calling, and I believe she should have continued to support Anakin (until, that is, he tried to kill her) even as he ascended into Power. The fact that there was this ambiguity in a major blockbuster is pleasantly surprising, and stands in contrast to (say) Chani in the film adaptation of Dune. (As an aside...Dune is supposed to be "Star Wars for grown ups" yet the heroine acts more like a child than in Star Wars).
  • There is some good--sometimes great--acting by Ewan McGregor. He was a standout among a cast that includes some excellent actors (including later Best Actress Natalie Portman). Ian McDiarmid also has one or two excellent scenes, in particular the conversation with Anakin at the opera.
  • The story itself is not a "black and white" "good versus evil" story. The Jedi really are plotting to take control of the Senate. They truly are lost: they lack conviction in their own ideals. They play the politics like any other faction. If it wasn't for the (contrived? arbitrary?) distinction between the Jedi and the "Dark Side", it would have been difficult to say who was "in the right" (at least, until kids started getting slaughtered).

Now for the bad:

  • The CGI. CGI will never stand up over time...and yet everything was CGI. Even the Clones were needlessly CGI. The actors spend the entire film against green screen. There were scenes that were obviously shot in a comfortable setting, but Lucas thought would look "cooler" in a more "action" shot, and so actors who are sitting on a green-screen couch are now suddenly supposed to be skimming a few miles in the air. Actors need some context to understand how to act, which is entirely lost if they are transported to a completely different setting post-production.
  • The 2005 digital cameras were loud and most of the dialog was lip-synced after shooting. This doesn't help an actor "feel" the scene.
  • While the actors certainly didn't get much help from the script or the technology, the acting still disappoints. Actors don't emote. They look like they are reading from a script. Ewan somehow managed to take a lousy script and no direction and still provide believable scenes, but no one else was up to the task.
  • The dialog itself is well below average. The movie opening has Obi Wan and Anakin infiltrating an enemy ship. This is intended to be a "fun" part of the movie, and much of the action is enjoyable. However, they are given lines that are clearly intended to be "quippy" but simply fall flat. The "best" line is Anakin's "no loose-wire jokes" when Obi-Wan doubts R2's capabilities. There are dozens of lines that are even worse.
  • This is a movie of two halves, and the first half is far worse than the second. The first half is a lighthearted and rather stupid romp. The other is a serious and dark drama. It is whiplash to go between the two.
  • Anakin's fall to the dark side is too sudden to be believable. Is he after power? Is he distrustful of the Jedi? Does he just want to save Padme? Is he jealous of Padme and Obi-Wan? There can be multiple reasons to ultimately make a life-altering decision, but none of these are truly fleshed out in a way that makes me believe he would turn to the Dark Side. The way to seduce Anakin is through promises of power and through making him feel part of the "inner circle". Yet Palpatine transparently lies to Anakin throughout the movie: from hiding his identity as a Sith Lord to praising Anakin for bringing peace when by that point everyone knows Palpatine orchestrated the entire war.
  • This movie also features some of John William's worst work. The most egregious is the copy/pasta of Duel of the Fates during Yoda and Palpatine's fight. The finale of the duel between Anakin and Obi-Wan feels like a music video more than a movie.
  • Certain scenes have abysmal sound design. While overall the movie feels more "compressed" (less variation between quiet and loud sounds) than Episode I and II, the Jedi confrontation with Palpatine is especially bad. There is almost no dynamic range. Surrounds have little activity. It almost sounds like it was mixed for stereo. General Grievous's death similarly lacks bass where it is severely needed, making the entire battle feel fake and inconsequential.
  • Now that I have three kids, Padme's death seems ludicrous. Once you have kids, they become your will to live, replacing pretty much everything else.

Other notes:

  • Both sides try to paint the other as intolerant and unyielding. "Only the Sith deal in absolutes". "If one is to understand the great mystery, one must study all its aspects, not just the dogmatic, narrow view of the Jedi. If you wish to become a complete and wise leader, you must embrace a larger view of the Force." Much was made at the time that the "Only the Sith deal in absolutes" line was a dig at George Bush's "if you are not with us, you are against us". Now, it just feels like an anachronism from an era where the only "bad" thing was intolerance.
  • The Star Wars movies do not explicitly say why the "Dark Side" is bad. They say hate and anger are key to the Dark Side, and the sinister aesthetics of the Emperor and Darth Vader certainly hint at evil. But when taking a step back, they seem like standard fare politicians, rather than something intrinsically "evil". And the "good" side, as mentioned before, has become just another political faction; also interested in power. Perhaps this is justification for Anakin's sudden turn: there isn't much outward difference between the "good" and "bad" side; so one may as well join the winning side.

The scripting flaws of Episode III reveal just how bad Episode I and II were. Episode I was almost entirely a waste: it introduces Padme and Anakin, and shows Palpatine gaining power. Nothing else in that movie was important for later films. Episode I should have started in Coruscant, where Anakin was in training to be a Jedi and Padme was a senator's assistant. This would have revealed the tension and interplay between the various factions and let their love grow in a far more believable setting. The Clone Wars would have started during Episode I, possibly with the destruction of a large portion of the Senate, which would have helped accelerate Anakin's and Padme's careers. Episode II would have been focused mainly on the Clone Wars, possibly showing how destructive it was even to the core of the Republic. It would also show the growing distrust between Anakin and Obi-Wan, and Anakin's budding desire for power. A risky move would have been to make Obi-Wan the twin's father, but it would have made the journey to the Dark Side far more believable. Episode III would then have been entirely about the Anakin's fall, and the destruction of the Jedi.

How does your interpretation of the Prequels change as a result of the Sequel Trilogy? I'll admit I still haven't seen Ep 8-9, because the first sequel was so unbelievably stupid that I didn't understand what the point was supposed to be anymore.

I grew up with Joseph Campbell interviewed at Skywalker Ranch. Star Wars was both low culture and high culture, and the Prequels played into that: they had grand ambitions to talk about racism and philosophy and ambition and fear. ROTS was a great effort in that direction, I just ultimately think there wasn't enough runway in the films themselves. Friends of mine who consumed stuff like the Clone Wars series liked ROTS better, it was one of the first franchises that found itself in need of side material to work.

I'm 33 now, I was primed for Episode I when it came out, and I loved it. I consumed the side material voraciously, the padawan series with young obi wan learning jedi philosophy, that kind of thing. By the time III came out, I was increasingly bored of it, and had moved on, and I've never quite come back.

How does your interpretation of the Prequels change as a result of the Sequel Trilogy?

You are mistaken, comrade. There was no sequel trilogy.

I maintain that Revenge of the Sith is the best Star Wars movie. While the execution is certainly flawed (in the ways which you already noted), I think the story it tries to tell is a wonderful idea. The slow corruption of a paragon into a villain is a great story, and far more interesting than the standard hero's journey stuff the original trilogy is about. I do wish that the execution was better, but I give it a lot of credit for unevenly executing a great story idea (as compared to the original trilogy which successfully executes a boring story).

He was never a paragon though. He's a whiny arrogant prick in AotC who basically abandons his Jedi training as soon as he's alone with Padme and then commits mass murder. He isn't even really seduced by the dark side, he's tricked because Palpatine just lies about how he can save his wife from death by pregnancy, and then immediately goes into kill-children mode.

The OT is definitely kind of a mess because of how many massive changes they made on the fly. The first movie was intended to be a standalone of course, so it's a very generic hero's journey tale, and Vader and Anakin were two different people. Even in Empire Leia wasn't supposed to be Luke's sister (hence the kiss at the beginning) and Yoda saying "There is another" was referring to his real twin sister secretly being trained somewhere else, but Lucas realized it was going to be an even more complicated mess. RotJ is a pretty wacky movie overall but the throne room scene is peak.

He was never a paragon though. He's a whiny arrogant prick in AotC who basically abandons his Jedi training as soon as he's alone with Padme and then commits mass murder. He isn't even really seduced by the dark side, he's tricked because Palpatine just lies about how he can save his wife from death by pregnancy, and then immediately goes into kill-children mode.

Sure, but those are flaws in the execution. The story tells us that Anakin is a paragon (in Obi-Wan's dialogue in episode 4, with the prophecy about him being the chosen one, etc). So yeah, the execution is flawed but the idea is very much there.

I'd just like to chip in that Matt Stover's Revenge of the Sith novelization does a good job at fleshing out Anakin's worldview and motives, as well as his dynamic with Obi-Wan - though it's also helped that my copy of ROTS is the three-in-one binding of the Dark Lord trilogy. You get the entirety of Labyrinth of Evil first to set up Revenge, and that's a great story that also shows Palpatine's surrogate-uncle relationship with Anakin and how he's been playing the long game of being Anakin's confidant while subtly cultivating his worst traits - his pride and his fear of loss.

Not to invalidate your critique of the prequel trilogy, I think it's a fair critique. I know saying "they fixed it in the novelization" doesn't fix the problems with the film, but I do think the novelization is worth your time if you want an official version (well, Legends-official...) of the story that's more coherent.

Also, I haven't talked about Rise of Darth Vader as the third part of the Dark Lord trilogy - it's good, but really more of an epilogue. Aftermath of Revenge and some character work on Anakin grappling with his cybernetics and dependency on the suit. I'm not doing it justice, unfortunately.

Yeah, Matthew Stover’s version is the best version of RotS for sure.

From my point of view, the prequels are well-written!

Roger roger!

For meme material, the prequels are some of the best movies ever made.

Then you are lost!

We have a contender for one of those one-line AAQCs.

Please explain.

I may be too easily amused, but it's a reference to a line from the prequels itself: "from my point of view it's the Jedi that are evil" (which is followed by "well then you truly are lost").

Have you ever looked into fanedits?

Personally I think the only entertaining thing that came out of the prequels was RedLetterMedia's feature length panning of them.

I've never watched this movie but I found this review interesting.

What is your overall opinion of George Lucas as a creator? Talented director but mediocre screenwriter? A hack on both fronts who got lucky once, aided by riding other people's coattails?

Great vision guy and good executive producer who desperately needs someone else to write the screenplay and direct the movie so his bad ideas can be shot down.

I think Lucas has great ideas: Star Wars and THX-1138 are both interesting concepts. I'm not sure how involved he was in the special effects for the Original Trilogy, but they were revolutionary for the time. I don't think he is a good screenwriter or director. The success of the first Star Wars (I refuse to call it "A New Hope" :)) can be attributed to a lot of luck (it originally wasn't going to even have a score) and creative tension and pushback from the actors and crew. Harrison Ford and Mark Hamil would change their lines or ad-lib; summarized pithily, famously, and probably mistakenly by Harrison Ford's "You can write this, but you can't say it". Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi were not directed by Lucas. Empire Strikes Back in particular, widely considered the best of the Trilogy, had relatively little creative involvement by Lucas.

Excellent brainstormer but badly in need of someone with the power to push back on his worst/most indulgent ideas (several of the worst ideas he had in the prequels we're proposed for the original trilogy but got shelved when others rightfully told him no). I suspect he's better as a writer than a director, but that's trying to evaluate months of work from a few scenes of bts material.

How the world would be different if Spielberg hadn't deferred to Lucas and instead had taken the helm he'd been offered! Three fantastic films, the build-up of the chosen one, only to see him fall to the Dark Side in bits and pieces, obsessed by the loss of the attachments in his life which he'd been told to eschew from the start.

several of the worst ideas he had in the prequels we're proposed for the original trilogy but got shelved when others rightfully told him no

So in the prequel trilogy, he fell victim to protection from editors?

That's my take, at least.

Switching from folding my laundry at home to folding my laundry at the laundromat has so far been a 10/10 experience for me in terms of getting the laundry fully done. Also, I really enjoy the aesthetic of nicely folded laundry in the basket when I pack it all up instead of the usual pile. The only drawback is all of the TVs are set to sports and I don’t know any of the rules of the common ones.

Additionally, I have now handwritten written up to 9 chapters of my personal story on regular looseleaf line paper going at a total of eyeballing 150+ pages. Unfortunately the story got longer, so I’m still on the rising action. I’m at a bit of a drag in the story so I’ve gotten into the hobby of testing out the hundred or so pens in my boyfriend’s pencil case every two pages. My findings so far are;

Sharpie S.Gel: 3/10 my boyfriend says at a glance it makes the most legible and aesthetic writing, but it’s a drag in terms of speed so I rank it the lowest tbh.

Pentel Wow! BK440: 3/10 it wrote pretty fast but the ink is faded and it’s pretty shitty in terms of comfort so it’s #2.

Uniball Signon207: 2/10 it has nicer ink than the BK440 the but writes almost as slow as the S. Gel which is a pain and is pretty thin in terms of linework.

Uniball Vision Elite: 4/10 it’s slow but can pick up speed if you find the right rhythm but super heavy on the ink so it’s satisfying.

Pentel EnergGel 0.7mm metal tip: 5/10 my current speedster and to-go, it has the dark ink of the Uniball and the fastest speed with a rubber grip that’s on another level. It takes me places.

Pilot Dr. Grip Gel: 5.5/10: love her. The gel grip is the best out of all of them, which is why it’s above the Pentel, but it’s just a little slower it. It makes up for in a nice dark thinnish line. I’m waiting to find something with comfort of the Dr. Grip and the speed of the Pentel.

Bic Round Stic M: 3/10 it’s fast but it sucks to hold it bites into my finger especially when the speed picks up.

Bic Soft Feel Med: 2/10 they added a grip to it and somehow made it worse and slower.

I never fold laundry. ADHD makes it interminable.

I have a "clean" basket and a "dirty" basket, and one type of socks which get turned inside-out when I take them off for washing and turned right-side-in just before putting them on. The easy life.

I have some traumatic memories with laundromats. I never used one back home since here we have domestic help who take care of all our laundry needs, but I did need to wash all our clothes (my ex-co-founder and I, I had two co-founders, talking about the younger, saner one here). For a few months, I forgot what it felt like to wear clothes that had been folded or ironed at all.

A funny incident was the time a friend of mine came to pick me up at my mud hut that I was vacationing in for a week. We both fell in the mud since the slipperiness was too much for his Vespa. All my laundry fell out of my bag. I spent 3-4 days wearing the same pair of shorts and t-shirts with a raincoat, to the point where most people I met would light-heartedly joke about it, including the PUAs reading my field reports.

I'm sympathetic to weird moments at the laundromat. I've developed a strategy of maintaining a resting bitch face at all times while keeping a super straight posture, refusing to make eye contact with anyone and keeping my eyes glued to my writing projects. Otherwise, I risk catching the attention of creeps.

After 3-4 days of the same clothes it must have been a special type of smell haha.

My experience was the total opposite, I only ever used them in South East Asia and everyone was helpful, cordial and happy to help. Being a girl makes a difference but we did have female expats there who reported the same things.

After 3-4 days of the same clothes it must have been a special type of smell haha.

I still bathed 1-2 times a day, so it was not that bad. Otherwise, I would have done worse with the girls there. Though there is something about worn clothes, some girls liked the smell of my t-shirt if they were into me, as it reminded them of me. I was too intoxicated to notice anything, honestly. Though I looked like a sitcom character with the raincoat and crocs and trying to shuffle whilst wearing that. I still cant believe I was able to dance for 7 days wearing fucking crocs.

Otherwise, I risk catching the attention of creeps.

Most dudes are creepy by default. If you live in the west, then some might even be homeless drug addict kinds who would scare any sane female.

Where I live, everyone uses the laundry mat, and since everyone includes everyone and it's connected to an interstate highway, there is a broad range of personalities coming in and out 24/7. Being helpful and cordial unfortunately runs a risk of the interaction being extremely awkward; it's best to keep very mindful on one's business and stay extremely neutrally polite. I've never subscribed to the notion that most dudes are creepy; I think people just can be creepy and there's a lot of people going in and out of that mat.

If you like dark ink and your paper is always fresh and well stored, the Uniball One is ludicrously black. I tried that kind a few months ago and wound up returning the pack of them, because they would consistently skip on paper with the slightest oil contamination. I'm mostly writing on scrap paper, grocery lists that spend all week sitting out on the table, and the like, so that was a no-go.

For feel and consistency, I settled on the Bic Gelocity and learned to love blue ink instead of being low-level irritated with off-black. But one of the pens you called "fast" is a ball point, and I can't stand those because of how much pressure they need, so that recommendation may not translate.

Third kid arrived on Friday, little baby goblin. Slowly starting to look more like a baby girl instead. Still cute and makes my heart flutter holding her.

Just came home from the hospital. Babys two older sisters love and adore her already.

I'm doing my part to be above replacement rate for population growth.

May Shiva bless you and your family, congrats.

Congrats!

Happy for you.

And yeah, don't they look like hell when they're fresh. Hope she's healthy and you all are doing well.

Congratulations!

https://www.themotte.org/post/1695/friday-fun-thread-for-february-21/301179?context=8#context

I'm following up on my alternate history scenario from a few weeks ago.

In this timeline some damn fool thing in the balkans causes the great war, just like in our world. But the US is distracted with the still-ongoing Indian wars. The sinking of the Lusitania is a footnote in history books and the Zimmerman telegram was an offer of perpetual alliance to the US, and military advisors and technical assistance, if America would invade Canada. This offer was politely declined, and the great war ended with state failure in Austria, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire simultaneously. Emperor Karl got German intervention- at unknown cost. The Ottoman empire underwent a popular revolt and would be forced out of the war with major territorial concessions. In Russia, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in favor of his brother Michael, who calmed the mutiny in the army by promising peace. Brest-Litovsk in this world made large territorial concessions and promised food exports sufficient to keep Germany and Austria in the fight for another year. Operation Michael did not succeed, but brought General Hindenburg and the French and British to the same page- a white peace was needed. Germany, Britain, and France, as the remaining great powers, agreed to status quo ante in the west, each agreed to guarantee Belgian neutrality and agreed that the three would have the right to gain new colonies. A French-British-German commission would oversee the Ottoman empire, currently embroiled in a civil war, but Russia would be left to sort out its own problems. Aggressive war on (the western portion of)the continent would be outlawed. Italy and Belgium, having little choice, agreed.

As it became clear that communists would gain the upper hand in the Ottoman civil war, the commission granted Greece permission to invade and occupy the Greek-majority portions of Anatolia, and Greece received substantial assistance from all three. The southern Levant would be a French mandate, supplying arms to Assyrian rebels in northern Iraq/Western Syria, and to a lesser extent Armenians. The end result- an Assyrian state cutting off newly communist Turkey from access to much of Mesopotamia, French plans for a Maronite state to supplement it... eventually. In Europe, Austria would remain under German occupation, their militaries would remain under joint command and while Austria would maintain separate embassies for quite some time, it de fact retained no independent foreign policy. Karl I managed to retain domestic independence, despite some border revisions, and his concessions to the Croatians and Czechs brought some German disapproval but both Karl and his successor Otto were insistent on domestic independence. Today the Austrian empire is a developed country divided into domestic administration on language grounds, but no longer has an independent foreign policy or military and remains poorer than Germany. The monarchies sit at equal level, but the joint parliament underweights non-German Austrian votes, and non-German Austrians are discriminated against in the military- probably the single most influential institution in the de facto joint government. Austrian regions are essentially SARs in the German empire who share a separate monarchy.

Russia spent the twenties and early thirties defeating nationalist revolts. Tsar Michael proved a more capable ruler than Nicholas, and reformed the army while making enough concessions to forestall further instability. The first foreign war was conquering Turkish controlled territory under the guise of protecting the region's Armenian majority; this was allowed to happen as a check on communism. Border revisions with Germany proved less successful, but outside of Eastern Europe the Russian Empire reached its old borders, and clashes in Ukraine and the Baltics never turned into a major war.

The real equivalent of WWII is termed, in English, the Pacific war, a clash between (originally)Britain and the Netherlands on one side and Japan on the other. After a surprise attack on the British naval base in San Francisco- with substantial collateral damage- the Republic of Texas declared war, and due to threats to their concessions in China Germany entered. The war had a few major effects, chiefly the revision of naval warfare towards a carrier dominated model, and was forced to an end when a German army, shipped to India and marched overland by British logistics, threatened the Japanese concessions in China while the attack on Hawaii- headquarters of the IJN eastern fleet- became too entrenched to be easily pushed out. Japan was forced to return territories taken from Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, and France, but allowed to keep territories captured from other minor powers. The other main effect of the war was integration of white commonwealth countries into the UK more intensively, with South African refusal being a minor crisis. The Indonesian war of independence was here a failure; the Dutch army was considerably stronger without the occupation of its homeland, and the formation of a pro-colonial alliance with South Africa and the Republic of Texas bolstered the colonial administration further. That assistance was paid back in the Nicaragua crisis, where Dutch troops assisted the Republic of Texas in preventing the Nicaraguan government from allowing a Japanese and US backed canal project which would shorten maritime trade routes from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and in South Africa resisting German colonial expansionism.

Today, Japan is the master of the Pacific, with seventeen carriers and 25 cruisers, Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, and most of coastal northern China are well-integrated into the empire. The commonwealth, with fifteen carriers and fifteen cruisers, relies on allies to match Japan in the Pacific, but is generally on even terms elsewhere- except for the north Atlantic, where it's the dominant power. France and the United States have much smaller navies and would rely on allies to fight either of the giants anywhere in the world, while Germany and Russia are land powers. There are a bevy of middle powers- the Netherlands, Texas, Brazil, etc- which would need their allies to defend themselves against any of the four sea powers. Turkish, Serbian, and interior Chinese experiments with communism are failures with bodycounts, but this is a world with more oppressive governments and frequent warfare than in ours; communism doesn't stand out in quite the same way. The European powers have retrenched from most of Africa- France maintains control of Morocco and the Commonwealth still rules Egypt and Kenya- but with much heavier internal interference than in our world. India is independent, and is a civil war ridden wreck under perpetual Russian threat, but Sri Lanka remains a colony, as do Indonesia and Indochina. Brazil is a middle power, but other parts of Latin America are not so lucky- Peru and Argentina(although wealthy in this timeline) are Japanese protectorates, Texas and the USA maintain colonial rule in large swaths of the Caribbean and central America, Mexico is a poor flyover country frequently bullied by more powerful countries, with its wealthiest regions from our world part of Texas. Venezuela is German controlled, still, after the pre-great war Monroe doctrine proved toothless.

Interesting stuff, why does India leave the British? Aren't the British still very strong as a power, the Americans weren't slapping them down? Do they pull out because it wasn't cost efficient to hold onto or something?

My general althistory headcanon is that a lot of anti-colonial revolts/insurgencies would've been put down hard if the two superpowers (USA and USSR) hadn't been anti-colonialist. Nerve gas and bombers is a tough combo to beat.

A couple brigades of Wagner are sufficient today to overthrow a mid-sized Central African country, one would think that some big power or other would end up running these places if only to secure gold mines and oil wells.

I think decolonization was a historical inevitability after WWI, and the northern part of the Indian subcontinent in particular was probably difficult to hold on to. Gandhi specifically probably succeeded in large part from American pressure, but I doubt the British empire even absent WWII keep India in the face of another sepoy revolt. My head canon is that local revolts push British control south, possibly with Russian assistance and the mainland Indian subcontinent is notionally a single state but realistically far more fractured than IRL, and that the commonwealth was more concerned with the transition to an oil-based empire than with territorial expansion. But, there’s definitely a greater extent of colonial rule in the second and third rule, and complicated statuses in between independence and full colonization make more sense than fighting a bloody war.

I just witnessed my first street fight in Scotland.

I was walking up the central promenade of a relatively big city, when i spotted about 20 young men, ranging in age anywhere from a geriatric 18 to grizzled 7 year olds. All of them had uniforms on, pure black hoodies, half of them with North Face logos from what I can tell.

I'm not sure what triggered the brawl, but before I knew it, two of the youngest members, couldn't be older than 12, both of them shorter than my armpits, began throwing down.

It was a pretty spirited fight! Proper form, good left and right hooks, drawing strength from the hips instead of the shoulder. They might have done serious damage to each other if they weren't 40 kilos fully dry. It quickly devolved into grappling, the smaller but denser lad pinned his opponent beneath him and gave him a good spanking, though at this point the ring of hooting and hollering lads blocked my view.

At this point, they had had their share of fun, and dragged the two fighters away, before cheering the victor and moving off down the street in good order.

The NHS doesn't pay me enough to intervene in public brawls, not when they seem to have the full consent of the governed. I quickly looked to make sure that nobody was actually hurt, and not spotting any nose bleeds or much more than a bruise, I went along my way.

If it matters to you, everyone involved was white, and from their accents, locals.

All of them had uniforms on, pure black hoodies, half of them with North Face logos from what I can tell.

I can't tell whether I'm annoyed that all teenage boys wear black, or just jealous that fashion wasn't so easy when I was a lad.

I was today years old when I found out that China Mieville is a man.

I genuinely thought they were a woman for the better part of a decade, I haven't actually read any of their works (Perdido Street Station is currently downloading), but everything I heard about it gave me feminine vibes in a way I can't really explain, let alone their name.

The City and the City is pretty good. I was impressed by how he managed to take a completely bizarre premise and make it seem mundane and ordinary, and authentically eastern European. The thing I'm working on is inspired by that, in terms of the setting.

I found out from this post, because the ~5 people I knew personally who recommended his works have obnoxious extremely political tastes in literature and entertainment, so I politely ignored him.

That's rather amusing given that he looks more like Vin Diesel than the typical science fiction writer. I've only read The City and The City, and while it was interesting the concept taxed my suspension of disbelief more than any other work of fiction I've read.

This was also my issue with the book. It was gifted by a friend, so I felt compelled to read all the way through, even though I could tell within about 20 pages it wasn't going to be my thing at all.

You're right about how he looks. I'd googled it, saw the picture of him and went, huh is that someone else? Then I checked Wikipedia only have it confirmed that he's a bald muscular man.

I assure you, once you’ve read PSS, there will be no illusions.

Second this.

I'm kinda surprised by the confusion TBH, but maybe that is from having read him - although I do wonder if the mistake would have been made 20 years ago? I can kinda see it today, maybe.

Third.

I've read quite a few works by Mieville and the one I'd recommend the most is October, which, while obviously and openly biased towards the Bolsheviks, actually managed to give me a better view of the actual timeline of the events during October Revolution than any of the "real history" works I've read on the subject.

I have a nice new gaming PC (5000 series gpu even), yet all I've played in the last three weeks is a few playthroughs of Civilization V. With a bunch of mods it still feels new, plus there are a few civs I have never even tried. My challenge now is beating the game with civs of middling power on Immortal difficulty.

I really enjoyed my time in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 before that. Played it a bunch in the week after it launched. But I got ever so slightly put off by a sequence where you are forced to (temporarily) lose all your gear, do timed objectives and complete the mission in the one way the devs intended. I'd rather not be stuck with that Hans guy for much longer; him getting executed would have been more or less okay in my book, lol, but there you go.

Anyone else here ever get easily 'bumped out of' these very good but long games where you feel like you kinda have to invest a lot of time per session and immerse yourself? The kind where it's really fun but it's not the easiest thing to just jump back into if you've been away from them for a few weeks. I have a lot of games like that on my list. A lot. It's not that I didn't like them, some of them I loved but never finished, but I develop aversion to the thought of jumping back into their worlds after some time away.

Graphically simpler games, like isometric strategy, seems a lot easier to return to, on and off.

I've sometimes read of the distinction between "systems" and "narrative" games. Obvious really, isn't it. The one is game mechanics possibly enhanced with a bit of lore or setting or plot, the other is a narrative that you navigate via game mechanics.

I personally find it nearly impossible to play narrative games. A book I'll want to keep reading to know how the story pans out, but in a game narrative just gets in the way for me. I found Cyberpunk 2077 alright because the writing was better than average and also very light! It was mostly a game about optimizing your ability to genocide criminals in a sandbox city, with a neat little mini-story-campaign bolted to it. And that campaign came in short bursts between freeform activities, never took control away from the player for long, and had very short railroad sections. Even conversations were mercifully short and to the point. I don't remember any other game in which I found the narrative so much as tolerable. Maybe the Blue Planet mod campaign for Freespace 2.

Other than that, all I play is systems games. My tags are procedural, sandbox, multiplayer. I like 4X games because they usually just teach you the rules and then tell you you sink or swim with them, can't stand mission-based RTS campaigns, and I very much hated the recent trend towards structuring 4X games through "quests". I'll play roguelikes and shooters that put you in a sandbox and tell you to figure out how to survive against an escalating difficulty. I play multiplayer games where the guiding light is the need to outcompete other players rather than to follow a story.

Looking through my steam library, this is the clearest delineation between games I actually play and such that I do not.

Maybe you're similar. Maybe you just need to embrace systems games over narrative ones.

You've hit on something important here. I've thought of the systems vs narrative distinction at some point, but had never put it into words.

While I can appreciate systems games, I am probably more of a narrative player, having spent more time on RPGs than any other genre. I think I would feel some emptiness or lack if I just abandoned rpgs/narrative games forever.

I think where it easily becomes an issue that evokes aversion is when the narrative doesn't suit me, or when a game that is supposed to give roleplaying alternatives and freedoms does not let me play the way I want. Such as when various dialogue options do not in fact lead to different outcomes but just railroads you into one direction while giving a false appearance of choice. You're supposed to be shaping your character through choice, and then he/she is just shaped for you. Or, like in KCD2, when all my inventory was removed, I was put on a timer, and had to finish the sequence in one way that the devs had decided for me. That causes some emotional dismay in me, and probably often leads to putting the game down for a while, and because it ended on a bit of a sour note the last time I played, there's a threshold to overcome to pick it back up again. Yes, I think this must be it... It's mainly about the absence of choice and liberty. Roleplaying without getting enough agency to decide the role.

I fear you're expecting a little much from video games, then. They're not tabletop RPGs where a DM lovingly crafts your choices into an evolving narrative. They're CYOA books. And unlike books, a new narrative strand doesn't just take an extra page or a hundred of plain writing, but also requires millions of dollars spent on a very expensive and time-consuming production process (at least for anything like AAA games). The more freedom for the player, the more the budget gets stretched, and the devs can't just sacrifice game length for freedom because most players will play the game exactly once, and if it's too short they will complain and review it poorly. So freedom gets the axe instead.

Good narrative games, for all that I know, don't offer freedom but a convincing illusion of it. They will always railroad you, but let you change the order, pacing or cosmetic details of otherwise fully predetermined events. The proliferation of games that tout "multiple endings" which then come down to reaching the end of the otherwise linear game only for the player to press a button to choose which cutscene plays is not a coincidental development. Many games let you make significant choices only in parts that do not matter for the overall narrative.

Maybe I'm wrong though. Maybe it's actually possible. Let me know if you've ever played any CRPGs that offered significant narrative freedom.

There are some exceptions. Or games that are better at upholding the illusion. Disco Elysium and Baldur's Gate 3, to an extent. Fallout New Vegas. The Witcher 2 and 3.

But I take your point. I think it's the advances in graphics towards more and more photorealism that have made me expect more from the roleplaying and gameplay too.

Anyone else here ever get easily 'bumped out of' these very good but long games where you feel like you kinda have to invest a lot of time per session and immerse yourself?

Yes. I would really really love these games (KCD1&2 are good examples) until the enjoyment fell off a cliff. My advice is ignore most side quests and focus the main story to maximise your enjoyment before burn out. And yeah, its kind of a 'where were we again?' feeling of requiring effort to get back into it that turned me off picking them back up.

It's not so much that the game itself made me burn out on it. I guess I didn't make it clear in my post, but what I'm really criticizing is my own neuroses and weaknesses of insufficient energy/capacity combined with insufficient flexibility. There's nothing about KCD2 that says I can't play it for 30-60 minutes at a time, a few times per week. It honestly doesn't have to be a "2-3 hours every day" type of deal. There are a few long cutscenes but you can always save and quit in pretty short order. The aversion is not a logical one. When it shows up simply because, for reasons unrelated to the game(s) itself, I was away from a game for a while, it's clear to me that the problem is somewhere inside my own mind. There's some emotional pain related to the concept of combining the type of gameplay you get in an RPG, with the emotional and moral decision making, with work or other more work-like things, in one block of time (e.g. an afternoon). Civ is easier to fold into a regular day, easier to relate to because it is strategy and it is isometric in perspective. More involved types of gaming evoke more of an all-or-nothing mindset for me. shrug

Anyone else here ever get easily 'bumped out of' these very good but long games where you feel like you kinda have to invest a lot of time per session and immerse yourself?

I bailed out on the first Kingdom Come game b/c of this as well as RDR2. It extremely obvious that RDR2 had a lot of work and polish put into it, but its sooo artificially slow where everything is dragged out as painfully as possible. Steam gave me a refund despite playing past their 2 hour limit as is took over 3 hours just to finish the tutorial section. A truely stunningly boring game for all the hype.

OTOH, Cyberpunk 2077 is very good now with the newish DLC and feels very easy to return to for me. There is a good quest log system and waypoints etc so you don't get to lost. CIV 7 (and CIV 6 while were at it), is out now. If you like Civ5, Civ6 is pretty much a direct upgrade. Civ7 otoh is a significant departure and reviews are mixed. Also there are all the Paradox games if you like those. I'm a big fan of the Crusader Kings games. A good simpler game is Timberborn, its a post apoc beaver colony sim.

I am of course aware of Civ 6 and 7. I don't agree that 6 is an upgrade. For me it's a downgrade. I just never liked its cartoony graphics, or the interface, or the IMO failed humor of the narrator, and didn't have fun playing it. I tried twice.

Anyone else here ever get easily 'bumped out of' these very good but long games where you feel like you kinda have to invest a lot of time per session and immerse yourself?

I've been driving my partner nuts with how much trouble I have sticking with Baldur's Gate. I don't quite understand myself here, honestly. I don't have an issue with point-and-click, I played Runescape for the better part of two decades. Long RPGs? No problem if it's a JRPG. Even if my go-to habit game (Warframe) wasn't a grindathon, I just don't get why I can't get myself to spend more than an hour at a time on BG3.

In that case, ask yourself why you should spend more time with BG3.

This is the way. At the the of the day it's a free time activity you do for fun, not a self-improvement project. If you aren't having fun, it's ok to put it down.

Agreed.

Now that I think about it there's this weird gamer specific sunk cost fallacy about the initial purchase and time investment that can make you think that you should finish it. Also not wanting a long difficult game to be able to 'beat' you through attrition.

To be fair, I do play some games as self-improvement projects. Games I sucked at, that I decided I wanted to beat anyways, and then I went and did that. Usually multiplayer games. Yeah, I beat Hunt: Showdown and Nebulous: Fleet Command. Had one good run where I dominated everyone, exhaled in satisfaction, took a screenshot framed it and hung it over the fireplace, went to write my memoirs and a steam guide, and never played the game again.

Joke. But I really do sometimes play a difficult game just to figure it out and beat it. Not "difficult" soulslikes, where the required skill is memorizing enemy placements and telegraphs, and not multiplayer games that just come down to memorizing maps and doing the sickest 360 noscope, or such in which you win by doing 300 APM...but, you know, games where you can get a little creative. Where you can actually compete with others in planning, judgement and honest-to-god tactics, and with enough unpredictability and randomization that you can't just learn every possible move for every possible situation in advance.

But then, improving yourself in those ways until you can beat others at those games is fun. It's not mutually exclusive, is all I suppose I want to say.

And then there's a million singleplayer games that I started because I don't even know why and they weren't fun and I tried to get my money's worth out of them anyways but it didn't work and the only winning move ended up being to stop playing.

Ya I find myself repeatedly drawn to games that have 30 minute to one hour play sessions. If they get much longer than that I have a good chance of dumping the game when real life forces me to quit in the middle of one of the long sections.

There is that old meme about gaming:

Young: you have skill and time but no money.

Adult: you have skill and money but no time.

Old: you have money and time, but crap skills.

I'm solidly in that adult phase right now. In many cases I've even downgraded to games that have 5-10 minute play sessions. Which often ends up being idle games, where I just check in on long running number counters and update a few things.

I enjoyed everything about the Witcher 3 except the combat, which I found absolutely terrible for capturing the core fantasy/conceit of being a superhuman warrior who could cleave ordinary humans in twain but still struggled against supernatural monsters. I fixed that, with a mod called the Witcher 3 Enhanced Edition, but even then, I never actually finished the main story. I did do all the DLCs, and the narratives were excellent.

I also drifted away from Read Dead Redemption 2. I found it interesting, but often mechanically tedious in a manner that made me double think my decision to boot it up, and I ended up never getting far.

Witcher 1 captured the superhuman warrior feeling a lot better, at least visually. Mechanically it's a rhythm game where you click at the right time, but visually, especially the group style captures it really well.

The game is very rough though, so it can be hard to get into. It's very impressive seeing the difference in budget and looks from Witcher 1 to Witcher 3.

RDR2 was pretty good, but so slow and plodding mechanically. The much praised story was middling IMO. But I did love hunting and fishing in the game. It seemed almost photoreal at the time.

The expansions were the best part of Witcher 3, so you didn't miss all that much. :)

Red Dead 2 can only be played in at least 4-5 hour sessions, in my opinion.

An intriguing new theological heresy came to me as I was preparing to sleep.

I'm a Trinitarian Christian and a geek, so I can't help getting nerd-sniped by discussions of the Trinity's internal "economy". My Triessentialism philosophy started from praying that God would resolve the apparent logical contradiction of the Trinity, and seeing an answer which has satisfied me for over twenty years. I've listened to the Trinities podcast (which turned out to be run by a blatant unitarian) and discussions of different formulations of understanding God's Trinitarian nature.

Now, I'm a fan of the Lutheran Satire channel's videos because of the hilarious and interesting ways they puncture heresies. Their most famous video, St. Patrick's Bad Analogies, source of the "That's modalism, Patrick!" meme, is a must-watch on or around St. Patrick's Day.

So this is the thought which came to me at bedtime and put a wide grin on my face. What if each Person of the Trinity is the only One Who exists, truly God before all and above all, but each in a different one of the three overlapping realms of the Physical, Logical, and Emotional? What if none of the Persons of the Trinity has ever met the others, but would have had to infer their existence through their effects on humans were He not omniscient?

It would make a fun and fascinating cosmological foundation for a fictional work of high fantasy, but here in our universe it's an obvious heresy, and I don't believe it.

So I think Jesus would have to be the physical one (the physical aspect?). Is the Law-giving Father logic, and the Spirit emotion?

Is the Old Testament God showing the emotional Spirit when he gets angry? Is He showing the physical Jesus when He leads the Israelites from the pillars of fire and cloud?

And I guess my questions can apply both to your sincere Triessentialism belief and also to your heresy (does it have a name?). I'm reminded of that SSC post from ages back of AIs in parallel universes deducing each other's existences.

(I wrote a better version of this answer, but the web ate it when I accidentally reloaded the page. Oof.)

I saw what I now call Triessentialism first in a passage which many scholars say was not in the original manuscript but was added by a later hand due to tradition: the doxology of the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6.

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.

I had been pondering the make-up of man, what the heck the "spirit" and the "soul" are and how they're differentiated, and "where" they are in relation to each other in the body in a Christian ontology. I'd also been thinking the idea that emotion and logic are as fundamentally different from each other as are the material world and the immutable laws of logic. (You can't hold a "two" in your hand, nor burn a "deduction" to release warmth.)

It was while pondering the differences between the three ontological categories that I realized this distinction was also present in the doxology. My reasoning?

  • We see the power of God mostly in the Old Testament where God the Father acted with great power on behalf of His chosen people
  • The word "spirit" is usually used for emotions instead of supernatural beings in everyday life ("the spirit of Christmas" and such) and glory is about our emotions when beholding God
  • The best king would be someone omniscient: infinitely intelligent, infinitely wise, and who knows everything.

So I identified the power as belonging to God the Father, the glory to the Holy Spirit, and the kingdom to the Son. (Of course, all three Persons have power and glory, and God is rightfully sovereign over everything, so it's not a "this Person of the Godhead doesn't have X" heresy.)

Once I'd seen this pattern there, I started seeing it throughout Scripture. (I don't have the Bible where I highlighted them (highlit?) with me at the moment, and Google is being unhelpful as usual nowadays.)

So do I have more reason to identify Jesus the Son with logic, and not the Father or Spirit? Quite a lot. John described Jesus as both "the Logos"/"The Word" and "the Light." Jesus called Himself "The Way, the Truth, and the Light."

Early Christians said they were followers of "The Way," a word that means both paths and processes. Paths lead the sojourner from the origin to the destination. Processes turn intention into action. Logic is about processes and algorithms as much as it is about interactions of the descriptions of things.

In Chinese, "Tao" means "The Way" and implies "The Right Way". Logos was a Greek concept akin to the Tao: an inherent order and regulation underlying the universe. Heraclitus pioneered the concept and wrote about it in various ways, non-systematically and sometimes contradictorily as a universal consciousness or the mind of a supreme Being, but usually as a receptacle of truth. Other writers picked it up before John, but John identified the Logos as co-equal with God the Father.

Light has taken on a more fascinating meaning to me ever since I pondered waveforms as a carrier of the information of what impacted the wave's medium and holograms as a capture of that waveform. The unknown writer of the Letter to the Hebrews has some of the highest quality Greek prose in the New Testament, speaking with the precision of a programmer and the expression of a poet.

hos ōn apaugasma tēs doxēs kai charaktēr tēs hypostaseōs

"He is the radiance (apaugasma) of the glory (doxa) of God and the exact imprint (charakter) of His nature (hypostasis)..." - English Standard Version

"He is the emittance of His majesty and the hologram of His person..." - my gloss

To perfectly describe God the infinite Being would take an infinitely precise Likeness, as flawless and divine as He. To measure God would take a standard as perfect and infinite as He.

In a way, the logical measurement is the "son" of that physical thing which is measured, existing with it even if the measurement has not been read out or recorded.

The Muslim writers sometimes speak of the Quran ("The Recitation") as God's uncreated word, not something created by humankind, the ultimate revelation, existing eternally with God.

Gödel's incompleteness theorems were among the first of several closely related theorems on the limitations of formal systems. They were followed by Tarski's undefinability theorem on the formal undefinability of truth, Church's proof that Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem is unsolvable, and Turing's theorem that there is no algorithm to solve the halting problem. - Wikipedia

Here, then, is that perfect formal logic which describes God: Jesus of Nazareth, who told the religious elites to love, and was killed for it. His resurrection is the proof of His correctness and their corruption.

Do you get like a prize or a title when you invent an entirely new heresy?

Also, there’s a chance Santa Claus will slap you.

Heresiarch

Okay, that’s probably worth it.

Fun. I was thinking recently that so much “religious experience” makes sense even when only including the emotional, and ignoring altogether physical facts and logic and memory. If you are praying in awe at God, then God can just be a placeholder, and provided the experience of “awe” occurs in relation to your life, it is a very beneficial experience to cultivate. Same with humility (a beneficial and adaptive state), petitions (salience of your desires), sustained worship (the training of our attention), thanks (the training of appreciation for things we ought to be appreciate of), apology (salience of wrongs), favor (confidence). We could be tempted to call a person who cultivates these feelings religious, even if it occurs entirely within one’s emotional activity and with no actual belief in God. And then, if there’s some scholarly theist who believes all the right things but lacks this emotional dimension, we would be tempted to call them totally lacking in God. It’s a fun thought: God as Divine Placeholder. God existing in periphery but lost as soon as we focus, like an object in the dark that can only be seen when we aren’t directly seeing it.

For grognards, any impressive use of the venerable Commodore 64 is worth watching. Take this demo, Nine, for example.

To someone unaware of the hardware limitations of the device, it’s a fun little animation suitable for kids. But show it to someone who’s tried to code on the beige beastie, and you’ll hear “but that’s impossible!” and “How?” several times. For starters, the C64 can only display eight “sprite” graphics at once, and they can’t go beyond the border.

It turns out the author is a coding magician using multiple very subtle and invisible tricks to make it all work out. This is the C64 equivalent of Penn and Teller’s Fool Us, and a fantastic job it is.

Very neat, and worth watching for the lovely tune alone. Thanks!

First time I've seen "grognard" used to refer to old-school computing people as opposed to old-school RPG/wargaming people.

Uganda Trip Report

I spent 12 days in Uganda visiting mostly wildlife-related places, including Murchison Falls, Kibale National Park, Queen Elizabeth National Park, Bwindi Impeneterable Forest, and Kampala. I went with one other person and had an experienced guide the entire time.

Any cultural info that doesn't have a link is based on talking to my guides (guide 1 is G1, guide 2 G2, etc).

Lions, Crocodiles, and Gorillas, Oh My!

We saw a bunch of animals, including (ordered from most common to least, with a coolest encounter or note about some):

  1. Antelope: There are a gazillion of these roaming around. This is the only animal my guide has accidentally (!) hit and killed, which isn't surprising.
  2. Buffalo: Terrible eyesight, but excellent smell and hearing.
  3. Hippo: Hippos really like being in the water. We saw approximately 200+ hippos with only three being completely out of the water (granted they generally come out at night). If you told me that I would've expected them to look like raisins, but nope, visibly smooth skin all around!
  4. Warthog (also called pumba): "The stupidest animal of all" according to G2. Apparently warthogs will be running away from predators and in the midst of their escape, forget why they are running and stop because "hey, why am I running when I could be conserving energy?" *cut to lion licking their lips with a nice warthog meal in front of them*
  5. Elephant: A ~15-member family came out to the Nile to drink while we were in a boat 10 meters away.
  6. Giraffe: These guys can run (gallop) crazy fast. There has to be a market for giraffe racing and betting.
  7. Baboon: Their asses are even pinker and more prominent in person.
  8. Gorilla: We were close (ranging from 2 to 10 meters) to them for an hour and got to see them traverse the forest while eating greens (leaves), grains (literal sticks), and proteins (ants). The silverback is an absolute unit. Contrary to popular belief, you can look them in the eyes, just not when they're being aggressive.
  9. Crocodile: Nothing crazy here. I was half-hoping for something like this.
  10. Lion: We witnessed a mother lion chase down and maim a young antelope to teach her cubs how to kill. However, they weren't that well-practiced because the antelope was alive and screaming for the 10 minutes we were watching them attempt to tear into its flesh. #natureismetal
  11. Rhino: What I originally thought was rhino fellatio happening before my very eyes turned out to be a rather large baby rhino milking from its mother.
  12. Chimpanzee: I was reading about the Gombe Chimpanzee War before going chimp trekking, because what else would I do other than inform myself of a chimp war before seeing animals that could easily rip my face off? So when they started screaming for reasons I could not understand nor see through the thick jungle, I knew it was time: I had to pick a side, to choose what family I would support in the 2025 Kibale Chimp War. Fortunately, a war did not start and we made it out.
  13. Leopard: Uneventful. We saw a single one on our way out of Queen Elizabeth NP sunbathing and doing nothing.

Conserving energy is the key to survival and it shows in behavior. The sun is so hot in the middle of the day that animals are forced to take cover in the shade of trees and bushes and do nothing else they risk overheating. Simple grazing is feasible, but running and jumping are effectively prohibited.

Whole Lotta Nothin' Happening in Villages

I was shocked at the idleness of most villages and towns. So many working-age people just sitting around doing nothing. Hordes of boda boda drivers would sit with each other gossiping about who-knows-what waiting for riders to come up to them; I did not witness them all clamoring to be the chosen driver. People would sit on front porches looking aimlessly. Children would play with each other. Business owners would sit at their storefront waiting patiently for customers. People would just be walking with nothing on their person, so aimlessly by all appearances.

It all just felt so... dead. Except the markets. The only market we went into was in Kampala, but all the others we drove by were pretty much the only thing close to "hustle and bustle" in the villages. This makes sense given how dependent Uganda's economy is on agriculture, but still prompts the question: how do economics work in these villages? D'Exelle & Verschoor's Village networks and entrepreneurial farming in Uganda talks a bit about the farming aspect, but not about anything else. In the States, people who don't do anything are either retired (very unlikely for these people), supported by the government (very unlikely for these people), supported by their family (very unlikely for these people), or just plain poor and get their money doing odd jobs (likely the case here?).

My guess is a) I'm underestimating how poor these people really are, b) my lack of economics knowledge is showing, and c) there's some information I'm missing. Or maybe this is just life: do a little bit of work to make a little bit of money and do nothing outside of that.

The Organized Chaos of Ugandan Roads

The roads here are wild. Maybe not as wild as some places (as my travel partner had recently experienced in the traffic nightmare that is India), but it's still not based on rules: size and convenience win out here, with things like solid yellow lines and traffie signs being mere suggestions. We passed slower traffic wherever and whenever we could so long as the opposite lane was either clear or had a smaller vehicle. These smaller guys, which included us at times, understood the rules and moves over accordingly.

Motorcycles mostly pass on the left, but will still weave in and out of traffic at will if it's the best option for them. We once witnessed about 20 of them hopping up onto the pedestrian walkways to avoid the nightmare that is Kampala rush hour. Anticipation by both parties is key here: the car driver must maintain their line and let the motorcyclist adjust their course accordingly. Unsurprisingly, Uganda has some pretty bad accident statistics as of 2024 and very few wear helmets:

UPF annual crime reports reveal that in the past five (5) years alone [2019-2024], the total number of road traffic crashes increased by 60 percent from 12,805 crashes in 2018 to 20,394 crashes in 2022. Fatal crashes increased by 22.1 percent in the same period. The country also experienced a 77 percent increase in serious cases and a 62.1 percent surge in minor crashes during the same period.

The World Health Organization estimates that road traffic accidents in Uganda cost the country 5 percent of its gross domestic product annually. ... government spends approximately UGX 315.72 billion annually on provision of health care services to road traffic victims across all the regional referral hospitals in the country.

That'd be like the U.S. spending $1.4T on accident-related healthcare alone! Oh wait, we already spend " a total of $1.85 trillion in the value of societal harm, which includes $460 billion in economic costs and $1.4 trillion in quality-of-life costs". Still, I didn't actually see any accidents happen; no T-bones (which is probably impossible due to how slow everything is), no fender benders, no motorcycles scraping the side of cars despite their mirrors being a few inches away.

And just to get a slightly-exaggerated idea of how bad the traffic is, just take a look at Kampala's taxi park. The gross number of taxis is necessary due to the sheer number of destinations offered, but it's still a clusterfuck of exhaust fumes, dust, and gridlock.

Roads between cities are fairly well-paved and well-marked. Roads that lead to villages are rarely paved and give what locals call the "African massage" thanks to their extreme bumpiness. If you're in mountainous areas, there is extremely high exposure to the side. I felt extremely uncomfortable a few times when our jeep was leaning heavily to the right with about 3 ft of road to spare between us and certain death.

You'll also see some interesting things while on the road. A few of my highlights included:

  • A man carrying a coffin (sideways) on the back of his motorcycle
  • A flipped-over, beer-carrying semi truck getting raided by the local populace (G1 implied raids like this—beer or otherwise—aren't uncommon)
  • A group of farmers trying to figure out the best way to load a full cow and four goats into the back of their old Toyota Hilux
  • Two cows with their heads locked together trying to win a fight

"Appreciate Me!"

Ugandans know how to take advantage of their rich Western tourists by putting them into awkward situations where they feel obligated to buy something to "appreciate" the people. Apparently it's not just Uganda that does this, but Nigeria too, at least related to bribes (and I'm guessing other African countries). See cumulo nimbus's comment from Matt Lakeman's Nigeria report:

Instead of ‘give me money’ Nigerians tend to say ‘appreciate me.’ ... ‘APPRECIATE ME THREE THOUSAND OR WE ARREST YOU! APPRECIATE ME THREE THOUSAND!'

Various guides around the villages we visited planned the donation part well by:

  1. Placing the pitch in the middle of the tour, so we'd have to keep walking with them afterwards and risk awkwardness if we didn't buy something
  2. Putting lots of eyes on us when we were being pressured to buy things
  3. Explaining how poor they were either before or during the sales pitch

Here I am, dripped out in Salomon boots, a PFG shirt, and North Face fanny pack... how can I say no? And for stuff you buy, you get the muzungu price, so prepare to spend a bit more than you'd expect. Occasionally they'll say something like "I normally sell it for X, but I'll give it to you for Y" to lessen the already-small, forced blow to the wallet and feelings.

Supplementary Income for Uganda's Hard-Working Policemen and Politicians

I was expecting to get extorted a bit more than we did, which only happened once. We were stopped at a police checkpoint, they asked my guide for a document that he wasn't required to carry, he offered to show them a picture of it, they said no and that they'll have to hold us unless he buys them both a soda. This happened outside the car away from us. The guard proceeded to come back with a smile on his face and cold soda on his breath to tell us everything is fine and there was just a small misunderstanding. We did see a checkpoint later that had a line of seven or so Ugandas pulled over, all of which were waiting to pay a nice little bribe to their oppressors according to G2.

G1 admitted to minor corruption across Uganda, while G2 said police were quite corrupt and it was a well-paying job to have. While corruption against the locals doesn't surprise me, against tourists does surprise me. I'd expect the government to make it clear that tourists were completely off-limits because of how much they contribute to the economy. Maybe the cops we met didn't care or didn't think they'd get caught.

Uganda's Corruption Perceptions Index score ranks it at 140 out of 180 countries.

The Male-Dominated Area of Relationships

Relationships, be it marriage, girlfriend/boyfriend, or just casual dating, is not like the West.

G2 and G3 are adamant that online dating is not used and a bit weird. "Just go meet them out and about [like a normal person]". G2 told me one of his clients paid him to drive two hours (one way) from a national park to a nearby city to meet up with a girl he had matched with while swiping on Tinder. Who knew Uganda could also serve as a sex tourism destination!

A man's wealth plays an especially important role in his attractiveness to common villagers. G2 said that if he were rich (owned his own guiding company, for example), he could stop at any village, point to any woman he wanted that wasn't married, and she'd come with him back to the city to live a life of luxury, including weaves and smartphones, the first two things you buy your girl to show her you truly care about her. The main physical proxy for a man's wealth is the size of his stomach, or his DBF (dad bod factor): high DBF = big stomach = lots of food = able to afford lots of food = rich = attractive = hubby material. It's that simple. I can only imagine the different fatmaxxing methods villagers use to get women to sleep with them.

Dowries (or bride prices, because it goes to the bride's family) still exist in the form of livestock or straight cash. It serves the groom's family well to hide their exact livestock numbers because you bet the bride's family is gonna give them the rich man's price for their priceless-but-not-really daughter. However, the dowry will not be returned to the husband if a divorce happens. This somewhat seems like the Ugandan version of a woman convincing a Western man to not get a prenup.

Domestic violence against women is prevalent according to the National Survey on Violence in Uganda:

almost all Ugandan women and girls (95%) had experienced physical or sexual violence, or both, by partners or non-partners since the age of 15

and based on G2 casually talking about beating women if they step out of line or doing something he's unhappy with.

Infidelity is also widely accepted for men, but not women, based on my discussions and statistics:

24% of women in 2022 reported that their husband or partner had multiple sexual partners while in 2023 ... 34% of men reported having sex with a person who was neither their wife or lived with them.

Men can and often do have girlfriends (they actually also use the term "side chick"!) in addition to their wife, sometimes even outright having multiple wives since polygamy is both legal and part of the culture. The wealthier you are, the more acceptable infidelity and polygamy is to both society and women.

Uganda's STI rate is fairly high at 25,000 per 100k (the U.S. isn't actually too behind at 20,000 per 100k, or 20% less).

Tattoos, or Why You're Not Married Yet

G1 and lodge staff claimed that tattoos are completely acceptable and not at all frowned upon. G2 contradicted this, saying that women are considered tainted (my interpretation, not his words) and would never find a husband if they had tattoos and men are viewed as criminals or bayaye, Ugandan street thugs who loiter around doing and contributing nothing. I'm more inclined to believe G2 since I never saw a Ugandan with overt tattoos.

See also A Cultural-Pragmatic Investigation of Tattoos among the Youth in Kampala-Uganda.

Dreadlocks are equally frowned upon and have an extremely negative connotation. If you're a good Ugandan who doesn't like torturing puppies or doing drugs, you keep your hair short or shaved.

The Friendliest People in Uganda

Ugandan children are incredibly friendly and autonomous. As our jeep traversed the mountain roadways kids would come running out of the woodworks yelling and waving and jumping to try to get our attention in hopes of getting some candy, or "sweeties" as they call it. I once rolled down my window to say what's up and had an 8-year-old firmly say "give me sweeties" with an unspoken, but heavily implied, "or I'll kick your ass". I did not give him sweeties nor did I get my ass kicked. We high-fived kids out of our jeep window, which G2 said made their day and is something they'd brag about to their parents; we played and danced with them in the villages; we made funny faces from inside the car; we (read: G2) told some kids intentionally blocking the road for a classic sweetie extortion routine that he would beat them if they didn't move... they quickly moved with looks of terror on their face. G2 laughed maniacally as he said "I told them in the local language so they will now fear me for long time".

Their autonomy and independence is nothing like the U.S. Every morning we saw throngs of village children walking to town to go to school by themselves. No parents, no school bus, no bored mom calling the cops complaining about how cruel and heartless and neglectful another parent was being by letting their child walk to school by themselves early in the morning. And they apparently did this every. single. (week)day. School wasn't a short jaunt away. Some kids walked 5 miles (one way, mind you) on uneven, hilly dirt roads to get to school, waking up around 5:00am to make it to school by 7:00am. A single branch of sugar cane was a common lunch. A brutal lifestyle when compared to the lavish ones some kids live; in a vacuum, still pretty damn difficult.

Some parents opt not to send their kids to school in order to get more help on the farm, in the garden, and or around the house. G2 explained that sometimes this is better for the kids—the Ugandan version of the high-school dropout who proceeded to start his own business and get filthy rich while others went to college and made the average American salary—because they can get practical experience early and have a nice headstart compared to their peers.

Most people stay in the same village their entire lives, with education being the primary reason they leave.

They also make a nice triangular population pyramid, which was consistently reflected in every town and village we drove through. Throngs of children walked and played around, easily outnumbering adults by what seemed like three times or more. The obvious reasons that are consistent across Africa are help with labor, poor family planning practices, and high mortality rates.

Pygmies: The Forest People

We met Pygmies—more specifically, the Batwa people—near Bwindi while on a village culture walk. They grew up in the forest among the wildlife and were forced out in 1991 when the Ugandan government declared Bwindi a national park in order to help preserve the wildlife inside, especially the gorillas. Some interesting notes on them:

  • The older ones had no concept of how old they are. (Well, one claimed to be 140 years old, so no accurate concept.) Time just wasn't a thing for them. They didn't (don't?) care about whether it was Monday or October or 1930. They do care about the seasons and weather because they are critical for survival. This reminds me of the Lykov family.

  • They're short. Like, really short. Like 1.55-1.60 m according to some studies short, but even smaller in my experience. Why? Some suggestions from Wikipedia:

    adaptation to the significantly lower average levels of ultraviolet light available beneath the canopy of rainforest environments. ... because of reduced access to sunlight, a comparatively smaller amount of anatomically formulated vitamin D is produced, resulting in restricted dietary calcium uptake, and subsequently restricted bone growth and maintenance, resulting in an overall population average skeletal mass near the lowest periphery of the spectrum among anatomically modern humans.

    lesser availability of protein-rich food sources in rainforest environments

    the often reduced soil-calcium levels in rainforest environments

    the caloric expenditure required to traverse rainforest terrain

    adaptation associated with rapid reproductive maturation under conditions of early mortality

  • Entertainment is mostly centered around singing and dancing. See this video.

Chinese Influence

There is a large Chinese influence in Uganda, namely in the form of technology and infrastructure. Hsiao & Faria's The Intimate China-Africa in Kampala, Uganda gives a wonderful overview of what the relationship was (and probably still is) like in 2018-2020.

Nasser Road, Forgery Capital of Uganda

Located in downtown Kampala, Nasser Road is known as the forgery capital of Uganda, offering passports, university degrees, permits, you name it. On the outside it's just a bunch of print shops for clothes and paper. On the inside... it's pretty much the same. You gotta know a guy that knows a guy to get the in on the forged stuff, which is actually pretty disappointing because I wanted to get my honorary PhD in Gorilla Studies from the University of Kampala. The way it was talked about made it sound like it was done pretty openly with police just looking the other way. Second on my list was a sick political poster (see link below), but alas, I couldn't find any of those either. I ended up settling for a custom T-shirt.

And it's not just documents that are illegal: the place I bought a custom shirt from had bootleg copies of Windows, Adobe Illustrator, and a few other programs.

Much to my guides' surprise and delight, I was the first non-Ugandan to ever mention Nasser Road to them. (To be fair and honest, I heard it from a friend when I told him I was going to Uganda, so I hereby pass this coveted award to him. You know who you are if you're reading this.)

See also Robocop and Bin Laden in Uganda.

The Amazing Race - Uganda Edition

I think a fun vacation idea would be an Amazing Race-style competition with friends, so here's one for Uganda. Illegality and health risks can be mitigated for the more risk-averse.

  1. Starting in Kampala, teams have to drive from point A to B in the fastest time possible. Time penalties include getting honked at, causing an accident, or crying because of how stressful driving can be.
  2. From point B, teams have to find their way to Nasser Road. Along the way, they must sample 40%+-ABV waragi with extra points being given for higher ABV. And none of that mass-manufactured crap—it has to be homebrewed, smell suspiciously of methanol, and be served in a dirty cup.
  3. Once at Nasser Road, teams must obtain a forged document. It can be a university degree, passport, permit, etc.
  4. Finally, a devious surprise: police are called on a suspicious foreign couple who just bought a forgery on Nasser Road. The objective now becomes escaping Uganda at all costs to avoid hard prison time. Teams are encouraged to use whatever means possible to do so. (/s for this part in case someone thinks I'm being serious.)

I was shocked at the idleness of most villages and towns. So many working-age people just sitting around doing nothing. Hordes of boda boda drivers would sit with each other gossiping about who-knows-what waiting for riders to come up to them; I did not witness them all clamoring to be the chosen driver. People would sit on front porches looking aimlessly. Children would play with each other. Business owners would sit at their storefront waiting patiently for customers. People would just be walking with nothing on their person, so aimlessly by all appearances.

First time in the third world? Honestly, this is kind of universal in poor countries, at least in the many I’ve visited. There has been online-right discourse on this, some of it unnecessarily mean.

The answer to your question is that much of the world isn’t really capitalist. In fact, pretty much everywhere outside of the highly atomised anglosphere, a few tax havens and some maritime trading states like Hong Kong and Singapore aren’t really capitalist. Even they have welfare, subsidies and so on, but most people aren’t hardline libertarians about this. From there there’s a spectrum to the other capitalist-but-with-substantial-additional-characteristics systems like those of much of continental Europe, rich East Asia and Latin America, then into fully hybrid systems, and then onto places like India and Egypt and big chunks of SEA and then to much of sub-Saharan Africa where a thin layer of capitalism is draped over a far more primordial system of economic relations that becomes stronger the further you go from major cities.

In the rest of the world outside those countries that trace direct ethnocultural lineage to England, capitalism exists to various extents alongside other economic systems. It isn’t that they don’t have private property, markets or trade, it’s just that the rules of capitalism, of supply and demand, of creative destruction, of shareholder value, of any real notion of creative efficiency don’t really govern the economic relationship (between labour and the ‘means of production’, if you want to be Marxist about it) for most people.

The formal private sector in full-time roles might employ somewhere between 5% and 25% of the workforce, usually the lower end of that range - Sub-Saharan Africa averages around 10%. There are some public sector sinecures usually concentrated in certain regions, and state jobs work very different to how they work in the first world (most don’t ‘really’ exist as actual jobs, to start) that vary significantly by country and region.

But most of the population work informally, if at all. The lucky ones own economically valuable assets like farmland or a taxi or machinery or a small business. The expectation is that family has a duty to employ family, which is why a small store might have 5 ‘employees’ (while in the West it would have 1) who are likely themselves paid informally and when it’s viable for the business.

Unlike in the rich world, the chance of long term stable employment and therefore of making enough money to retire comfortably or to make a living off capital (even in retirement) is pretty much zero outside of a small, largely endogamous middle class in a handful of major cities, so there isn’t really the same work ethic. If you hustle hard your stuff is going to get stolen, you won’t have as much time with friends and family, and if you make anything of yourself you’re going to have to share it with the whole community anyway, so the incentives are minimal to even try.

This is what euphemisms like “the pace of life is just slower” actually mean. Inside Europe, you see the same thing between, say, the Netherlands and Greece. There are a tiny number of countries with a deep-level culture of working hard and working constantly (idle hands etc), mostly in Northwestern Europe and settler colonies, to some extent maybe in Japan, and then the Chinese have their own millennia-old complex relationship to labor, but that’s kind of it.

I've been to places like this though don't have anything but anecdotes. My guess is "the pace of life is slower" means markets here are broken, so you can't buy much, so there's really no point in working much. They didn't choose the simple life out enlightened non-materialism but because there's no way to choose anything else.

For an exploration of the ‘if you make anything you have to share anyways so why bother’ from the inside of the culture, pick up The Black Tax- it’s South African so it’s in English and framed as a self help book to help black earners keep more of their money to spend on themselves.

Theo Dalrymple wrote about it when discussing practicing medicine in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe before, during and after the move to majority rule there, too.

Theo Dalrymple

Highly recommend "Life at the Bottom" by him if you haven't read it. A bit dated now but important for people who have mostly theoretical exposure to the underclass.

almost all Ugandan women and girls (95%) had experienced physical or sexual violence, or both, by partners or non-partners since the age of 15

Sorry for hijacking your thread, but I'm always confused when I see the use and misuse of these types of violence against women and girls sources to prove things about patriarchy. Firstly, you're citing a UN Women-funded source, which is an organisation that is known to be hilariously politically biased, and secondly because it's only providing statistics for women. In countries like Uganda, statistics that "95% of [X population] have experienced violence since the age of 15" aren't gonna be hard to find because these countries are dangerous places in general, and presenting them without any comparative data for the relative rates for other groups really don't prove anything about the level of Male Dominance in the country.

Furthermore, in the VAWG source you're using:

"Appendix table 3.3a shows that overall, more than half of the women (56%), have experienced both physical and sexual violence or either physical or sexual violence perpetuated by their partners. Physical violence was relatively higher (45%) compared to sexual violence (36%)."

But,

"Sometimes husbands/partners perpetrate violence as a response/copying strategy to their wives’ behavior. In the VAWG survey, women were themselves asked if they ever initiated physical violence against their husbands/ partners under any circumstances within the 12 months preceding the survey. Figure 3.10 indicates that of the women who had reported violence in the past one year only 14% had never initiated physical violence against their partners, while 62% had done so once or twice, 20% had initiated several times and four percent initiated most of the time."

Going just off their self-reports, which you would expect to be comparatively favourable to the women doing the self-reporting, 86% of the women who were abused were violent to their partner themselves at some point during the past year. In other words, most partner violence captured in the survey is actually likely to be mutual abuse of some form, not unilateral male-on-female, and this should be ringing some bells in your head that the women-only statistics you're being presented do not represent the whole picture. They have also said they had a questionnaire on violence against men at some point, but for some strange, unfathomable reason the statistics on violence against men are not presented here whatsoever.

Also note that hundreds upon hundreds of studies demonstrate that women are as likely or more likely to perpetrate partner violence than men, and many of these studies demonstrate that gender symmetry in partner violence persists as a finding even when you look internationally. "almost one-third of the female as well as male students physically assaulted a dating partner in the previous 12 months, and ... the most frequent pattern was bidirectional, i.e., both were violent, followed by “female-only” violence. Violence by only the male partner was the least frequent pattern according to both male and female participants." This is consistent with results from Jordan, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia, and so on, all "patriarchal" countries by WEIRD definitions. Israeli women are more likely to escalate aggression, both verbal and physical, in a partner context than men are. This is a finding that has been repeatedly supported: "Women’s escalatory tendencies toward their spouses (M 52.36, SD 5.86) were found to be higher than were men’s escalatory tendencies toward their spouses (M 51.87, SD 5.69)." So to not study male partner-violence victimisation in Uganda before concluding the presence of male dominance is questionable, but from a brief review there seems to be quite few Uganda-specific studies that are conducted in a way which allows direct comparison of partner violence victimisation between the sexes. Though that's not surprising.

Funnily enough, the focus on VAWG in that report, if anything, suggests to me that people might be more sensitive to violence against women and girls than they are men and boys.

24% of women in 2022 reported that their husband or partner had multiple sexual partners while in 2023 ... 34% of men reported having sex with a person who was neither their wife or lived with them.

This source re infidelity has the very same issue - the quote you've provided here "24% of women in 2022 reported that their husband or partner had multiple sexual partners while in 2023 ... 34% of men reported having sex with a person who was neither their wife or lived with them" doesn't provide any countersources for women, and in addition while it's not hard to imagine that male infidelity might be more tolerated in cultures that allow polygyny, there are also other sides to the bargain in these cultures which often aren't represented properly.

For example, Baumeister's view on the differential penalties regarding adultery attempts to nuance this view. Looking at differential penalities for adultery (which he asserts was common throughout history), his perspective is that sex is a female resource that women gatekeep, and men give women resources in exchange for sex. In line with this view, the woman's contribution to the marriage is sex, and the man's contribution to the marriage is resources. Thus female infidelity is more of a violation of the social contract than male infidelity is.

Baumeister goes on to summarise the results of a cross-cultural study of marital dissolution by Betzig. "[W]hen only one gender’s infidelity was sufficient grounds for divorce, it was far more often the woman’s (54 cultures) than the man’s (2 cultures). ... These patterns reflect the assumption that sex is something the woman provides the man rather than vice versa. ... In contrast, women but not men were permitted to divorce a partner on the grounds of failing to provide other resources, including money, housing, food, and clothing. (The only exception was that in one culture, failure to provide food was a cause for a man to divorce his wife.) Thus, the woman’s obligation to provide sex appears balanced against the man’s obligation to provide resources for support."

His perspective is that there are reciprocalities in traditional marriage that have been ignored, and that authors rarely cite male obligation (the greater obligation of men to provide resources in the marriage, which is his main contribution to the woman) in order to balance their analysis of the sexual double standard (the greater obligation of women to provide sex and to not give away her main contribution to the man). By erasing half the story, it's very easy to paint a picture of oppression of women, and most people generally do not adequately address the larger social context in which this supposed "double standard" often operates in.

Finally, I would like to note that polygyny isn't all beneficial to men either. What polygyny does do is create a very large reproductive skew among men, and it's impossible to argue that male reproduction is not effectively controlled too in highly polygynous systems. In fact I'd go as far as to say a polygynous society controls the reproduction of unsuccessful men and not the reproduction of women, since it allows successful men to deprive their male competitors of opportunities. In their paper "Why Monogamy?" Kanazawa and Still propose a female power theory of marriage practices, hypothesising that polygyny arises when women have more power in a society with high inequalities of wealth among men. Using data obtained from political science and sociology indexes, they demonstrated that societies with more resource inequality among men were more polygynous. Additionally, they found that, controlling for economic development and sex ratio, when there is greater resource equality among men, societies with more female power and choice have more monogamy; but when there are greater resource inequalities, higher levels of female power are accompanied by higher levels of polygyny. Accordingly, the incidence of polygyny may indicate female choice rather than male choice and cannot be assumed to benefit men over women.

Sorry again - I just feel like Western commentators, in general, badly misunderstand other countries on this front.

EDIT: fixed a number

It's Uganda though, the home of Idi Amin and Joseph Kony. It seems pretty reasonable to conclude that women have a tough time there, as does everyone else. Shouldn't our default expectation for Uganda in all departments (and especially the quality of the population) be 'very bad'? I thought Uganda was where they were killing bald men for gold in their heads, turns out that was Mozambique... Anyway, they have plenty of problems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_sacrifice_in_Uganda

If there's widespread child sacrifice, why not wifebeating too?

This isn't a defence of Uganda and I have no special love for the culture there, nor do I doubt that wifebeating is occurring in the country. I just press X to doubt on the idea that women uniquely or disproportionately face violence, in relationships or outside of them - Uganda is just a country where the acceptability of violence is much higher, perpetrated by or on anyone, and I wouldn't want to live there myself. There's no doubt that anyone would have a tough time, but I always scratch my head when I see people portraying situations that are bad for virtually everyone with an "including women and children" bent. To be charitable I get why people emphasise this aspect - it's much easier to push for aid when you stress how social ills affect women and children - but I still can't make myself like it.

The strings attached to aid for domestic violence prevention tend to be things like ‘let our NGO hold classes no one will go to unless there’s free food’ rather than ‘the different rebel groups must agree to a ceasefire in exchange for food aid’.

Frankly, I'm not 100% sure you realise just how effective some of these strategies for ideological capture can be in the third world. As an example, I know managers of larger companies in Malaysia, ideal targets for evangelism who have effectively reported to me that DEI standards have been pushed by external orgs onto their companies, and the boards of directors sign off on these plans in spite of the fact that they don't really seem to care about them. For them, it's just the path of least resistance, but they effectively adopt targets which affect how they function and have large cumulative effects when collectively implemented by a large swath of companies at the same time.

If the NGO-organised classes don't work, there are plenty of other methods of prevention to make sure women are "emancipated", like the funding of shelters (which will provide help only to women, of course), or more likely improving what they consider metrics for women's independence which may involve requiring the implementation of quotas and initiatives to ensure X% of female economic participation at the expense of the male labour force. Missionaries Progressives impose change in a top-down manner, not in a bottom-up way, and I am always surprised that conservatives treat them as ineffectual quokkas even when they've proved otherwise time and time again. They're not omnipotent and they can't Thanos-snap their will into existence, but given that the UN were willing to provide female-selective food aid in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, implementing explicitly discriminatory strategies are most certainly not beyond them.

It's been a hard week, and I've been feeling a bit homesick about the country I grew up in - Malaysia. Having been born there, I didn't see it as anything particularly special, and I didn't use to understand why people would willingly go to these countries, but now I do. And I started writing about it, and it grew into a whole essay, so here you go.

I lived there for sixteen years of my life, and after having seen many other parts of the world I can confidently say there's really no other place like it. Maritime Southeast Asia is a ridiculously colourful and culturally heterogenous place, with Malaysia being no exception, and this seems to rear its head in virtually every part of society. Even the groups stemming from prehistoric Malaysia are stupidly multiethnic, with the famous current day Orang Asli hunter-gatherer population being highly heterogenous and having populated Peninsular Malaysia in distinct waves of migration. The Malay ethnic group itself is subdivided into many ethnolinguistic subgroups and the first time a coherent Malay identity arose was only during the 15th century Sultanate of Malacca, which introduced many aspects of modern-day Malay culture and syncretised the Old Malay language with Arabic and Persian influences, merging them with its original Austronesian roots. All while this was happening the first Chinese properly immigrated to the Malay peninsula, in a period of good relations between Ming China and the Sultanate of Malacca. Some of them settled down and intermarried with Malays, and an extant syncretic ethnic group and culture called Peranakans originated from this process. Minangkabau from Indonesia also came to the peninsula over the years, forming large permanent communities in many states. Tamil traders settled in the capital city of Malacca, forming yet another hybrid group called the Chetti Melakans who speak a Malay patois with many Tamil loanwords, and Malacca slowly became one of the most important cities for trade, welcoming people from many corners of the globe.

The Portuguese arrived in the 1500s and occupied Malacca as a possession of the Portuguese East Indies, attempting to snatch up this crucial choke point in order to get the upper hand over Venice. They, too, ended up forming a longstanding syncretic community in Malacca called the Kristang, a group with primarily Portuguese and Malay ancestry and which developed their own minority creole language still spoken today. Portugal also encouraged the immigration of mixed-race Catholic converts from India, and still others made it to Malacca from Portuguese colonies in Brazil, East Timor, Africa, and Macau. Then the Dutch captured Malacca and employed a lot of Malaccan Chinese, whom they found industrious, to construct Dutch buildings. The flow of Chinese and Indian immigration continued throughout the colonial period, and peaked during British colonisation specifically. British officers made their first incursion into Malaysia with the 1786 settlement of Georgetown and slowly expanded into the rest of the peninsula, and as they did so millions of Chinese immigrated to work in pepper cultivation and tin mining. By the 19th century, nearly five million Chinese had immigrated, and stable communities quickly formed. Tamil Indians were employed in plantations through the Kangani system, and their population boomed. Chinese populations took a hit during Japanese colonisation and specifically during Sook Ching, when they conducted organised mass killings of Malaysian Chinese men (an event that had wide-reaching effects, including on my own family; Japanese officials called up the brother of my great-grandfather for interrogation and no one ever saw him again), but regardless these populations remain very prominent up into the modern day.

Got all of that? Good, I've explained maybe 5% of the whole story and there are very many more cultural shifts and migrations to cover, but that would require an entire history book to fully explain. In any case, the sheer amount of cultural variety that exists here shows up very prominently in the language and cuisine and urban landscape. "Melting pot" doesn't even begin to describe it. Virtually everyone in Malaysia is multilingual, and it's not uncommon for their sentences to consist of a schizophrenic blur of Malay and Cantonese and Hokkien and Tamil and English. They're not even necessarily speaking formally recognised creoles, they're just finding the best word from every local language to convey what they mean and seamlessly blending different syntax rules as they go. Even aspects of life as mundane as public holidays have been profoundly affected by this - the list of holidays has become mindbogglingly long, just so every major ethnoreligious group's holy days can be accounted for. The religions themselves have also begun to syncretise and form strange little micro-cultures of their own; for example Chinese communities on the peninsula have long worshipped local Malay-Muslim guardian spirits collectively called Datuk Kong, and you can see little red shrines dedicated to them all around Malaysia. When Chinese devotees pray to them, they customarily abstain from consuming pork or alcohol on that day, and offerings also exclude those things as a gesture of deference to the Malay origin of these deities.

The historic port towns of the straits, Georgetown and Malacca, are particularly good examples of this cosmopolitanism. They play host to a gaudy and eclectic soup of different cultural traditions, featuring everything from Dutch colonial squares that now host open-air markets operated by ethnic Chinese and Malays and Indians, to stately British government buildings and Anglican churches nestled amongst rows and rows of vibrant Wes Anderson-esque Peranakan shophouses, to fragrant, incense-filled Taoist-Buddhist-Confucian temples located just down the street from Islamic mosques and Hindu temples, to waterside heritage mansions with a fine view of traditional stilt clan villages built into the waters of the strait, and so on. Sometimes you find really unexpected things in the urban sprawl, like a polyglot letterpress printing house in Malacca that happens to be one of the oldest in the world, or an unassuming heritage home in Georgetown where Sun Yat-Sen made his plans to overthrow the Qing Dynasty, or a colourful 1850s working temple in the suburbs of Penang filled with free-roaming pit vipers that are believed to be the reincarnated disciples of a deified monk. These straits cities are unpretentious places in a perennial state of glorious decay, swamped with humidity, buffeted by monsoons and assaulted with swarms of flies and mosquitoes, but the urban fabric blends an unimaginable number of disparate traditions together in a way that feels completely natural. Outdoor markets are everywhere, and they're packed to the brim with a mindboggling array of foods that borrow influences from varied parts of the globe. There's Chinese-Malaysian fare like char kway teow and bak kut teh (respectively: wok-fried flat rice noodle and herbal pork ribs soup), there's Malay delicacies ranging from ikan pari bakar to nasi lemak to air bandung (spicy grilled stingray, rice cooked in pandan leaf with homemade sambal, and rose syrup milk), there's weird hybrid cuisines like Peranakan cuisine that offer up dishes such as asam laksa, otak-otak, cendol (tamarind and mackerel noodle soup, spiced fish cakes wrapped in banana leaf, pandan jelly shaved ice), and more. Maritime Southeast Asia features a syncretism you don't really find anywhere else and it's simultaneously overwhelming and kind of magical at the same time. You think it’s bewildering reading about it? Try living there. If you ever get the chance to visit, I recommend it and think an outsider would have a great time in spite of all the obvious third world-ness. Malaysia's a lot of things, but it's never boring.

That's the good side of multiculturalism - in fact, it's multiculturalism at its very best, seeing all of these different traditions and value systems bump up against each other and interact in interesting ways. The darker side is that multiculturalism is typically not a terminal value for most ethnic groups; it is superseded by many other group-based considerations and affiliations in spite of all the syncretism, and the "melting pot" contains all these fine little gradations of difference which quickly resolve into large-scale tribal groups once you look a little deeper. And it's necessary to note here that people are typically not actively expressing prejudice towards each other in broad daylight, in fact they live with each other quite frictionlessly in day-to-day life, but all of that finely tuned ethnic tolerance is reliant on - how do I say this - peace treaties and other such understandings negotiated between the various ethnic groups that maintain the cosmopolitan state of affairs. Not all of their terms are good or even remotely reasonable. These treaties have failed before, and when they fail, people die. Hell, Singapore was ejected from the federation in no small part because of racial politics, and all the way back at the founding of Malaya as an independent nation, the cracks in this multicultural vision were already beginning to show. Malaysia possesses one of the longest-standing and most egregious examples of racial affirmative action I've encountered, established to placate ethnic Malays after tribal conflict escalated to the point where they massacred a good number of Malaysian Chinese in Kuala Lumpur for eroding their traditional majority in Parliament and supporting the principle of colour-blindness and also just doing too well economically, with bodies disposed of in unmarked graves near leper colonies and thrown into rivers. Any vaunted dream of a melting pot without ethnic conflict was just that - a dream, and it's part of the reason I left in the first place. But I can't help but look back at all of the good stuff and feel a little bit wistful about it all. The culture is fascinating, the food is among the best you'll find in the world, and there's a buzziness and vibrancy to it that's honestly infectious.

There's probably many people who think of Malaysia as some kind of irrelevant backwater, but it's actually surprisingly developed for a Southeast Asian country. For a good couple decades the country has been charging headlong into economic modernity, and the level of infrastructure you can find in parts of Kuala Lumpur might be surprising for the average outsider. Frankly, that's not without its discontents - there's a strong nostalgia for an older, sweeter, more innocent Malaysia, one where the cities were quieter and more traditional, one where people regularly lived in kampungs and cycled through groves of primary rainforest just to visit other nearby villages. It's like the Malaysian analogue to the 80's nostalgia in the West, except possibly even more potent; my dad has regaled me with stories from his childhood about a much more rural Penang, a beautiful mix of reality and fantasy where he could ride his bike down to the beach without seeing a single modern condominium and follow isolated, traffic-free trails into the hinterlands of the island where monkeys and chickens freely roamed. Cartoonists like Lat who paint intimate pictures of childhood in a Malaysian kampung are highly popular within the country, and strike something buried deep in the heart of national consciousness that seems to yearn for the good old days, filled with stilt houses and cycle rickshaws and other icons of Old Malaysia. This idyllic image of a Malaysia that once was has become a source of national identity, as much as their melting-pot cities are, and many spots in the city now attempt to foster that traditional vibe. But the constant cultural shapeshifting hasn't stopped, and it won't any time soon.

I'm actually considering going back someday just to see all the stuff I missed when I was living there. It's a bit strange thinking about all the things you don't notice about your own home country when you grow up there, realising that you've only come to appreciate them when you're gone.

ive only been to kuala lumpur and I feel like I'm missing out on the rest of malaysia. my impression of the city near bukit bintang was that it was somewhat empty shopping malls and skyscrapers spaced out by dense blocks of slums and pedestrian hostile infrastructure. the outskirts were unremarkable by south east asian standards. I never felt particularly unsafe.

The racial economic caste system was obvious to me, as an outsider. Businesswise, english speaking Chinese seemed to be the most trustworthy, followed by "bumiputera". Did not interact with laborers from the subcontinent but was warned to keep distance by my singaporean guide.

I saw a monkey in someones back yard. I saw a temple filled with trash. I saw some fantastic islamic and colonial architecture. I saw a guy on a motorbike get smeared on the asphalt by a truck.

One of the best cities for food I've ever been to

There were a lot of russian men when I was there for some reason

Did not really feel like a islamic country in the same way as indonesia.

ive only been to kuala lumpur and I feel like I'm missing out on the rest of malaysia. my impression of the city near bukit bintang was that it was somewhat empty shopping malls and skyscrapers spaced out by dense blocks of slums and pedestrian hostile infrastructure.

I've lived in Kuala Lumpur for much of my life; while it's the most modern place in Malaysia and there are things I do like about it (not least the food culture) it's definitely not inaccurate to say that the urban landscape there is a bit haphazard. Some parts of the city are criss-crossed with overpasses to the point it's almost comical - the city has pretty much grown in an unplanned, uncontrolled way since it has expanded very rapidly and it's easy to push through any development you want with a little bit of bribery. For me it's a source of nostalgia at this point, but I feel like I would be remiss not to say that there are far better places to be in Malaysia as a visitor if you want to see the more charming, rustic side of the country.

The racial economic caste system was obvious to me, as an outsider. Businesswise, english speaking Chinese seemed to be the most trustworthy, followed by "bumiputera".

While I'm not at all the biggest proponent of the affirmative action policies there, the economic disparity between the Chinese and virtually every other group is certainly very noticeable (it is not uncommon for Chinese to be a market-dominant minority group everywhere they go). Thing is, there's a strong selection bias going on with this - much of the Chinese diaspora emigrated with the expectation of finding opportunity elsewhere, and this has ended up having a large skewing effect on overseas Chinese SES.

To some extent I do understand why animosity exists against the Malaysian Chinese, but at the same time it's hard for me to be overly sympathetic. My great-grandfather grew up in China as a child worker shovelling pig shit to sell as fuel, and barely made it into Malaysia with (most of) his family as an unskilled labourer trying to work his way up. The stuff he went through is insane - there's too much to list here, but he had his property confiscated and his brother killed during Japanese occupation, he at one point was burned badly during an explosion at his work as a mechanic, yet despite it all he somehow managed to make a fortune for himself. He possessed a seriously admirable level of tenacity and work ethic, and I can't say he didn't rightfully earn his wealth. It isn't adaptive for a country to penalise that kind of dogged entrepreneurship because of tribal ressentiment at a group's success - especially in a country like Malaysia which can't offer a significantly higher quality of life compared to neighbouring states, these policies end up causing brain drain and emigration of the most productive segment of your population to places like Singapore which offer more opportunities and don't consider your success a social problem that needs to be fixed.

Did not really feel like a islamic country in the same way as indonesia.

Islam is a far less prevalent religion in Malaysia than it is in Indonesia, so that's to be expected.

You have made Malaysia sound very charming! I had already planned to do a combined Singapore-Kuala Lumpur trip at some point in the not-too-distant future, and you’ve inspired me to want to visit more of the country! I’m nowhere remotely as well-traveled as @2rafa, so I’ll almost certainly hit you up for some tips and recommendations once my trip idea actually starts congealing into concrete plans.

(EDIT: I picked a random spot in Malacca on Google Street View, and I’m immediately confronted with a food truck advertising, in English, “Luojia Stinky Tofu.” I am committed to being as adventurous an eater as possible during this trip, but I may have to draw the line at anything where “stinky” is considered a selling point.)

It is very charming, and I'm glad I made you want to see more of Malaysia! I'd be happy to offer specific recommendations at any point, but will say upfront that many locals see Ipoh, Georgetown and Malacca as nice towns, and I would agree they're must-sees if you're interested in cultural sites - the old-town areas of Georgetown and Malacca have been inscribed as UNESCO world heritage sites, if that's worth anything to you. Penang in particular is widely acknowledged as having good food (though any discussion about which city/state has the best food in Malaysia inevitably devolves into a regional flame war). For more natural things to do, I distinctly remember climbing into a wooden boat as a kid and having a local man sail my family and I around the coastal mangroves at night, seeing the swampy thicket get lit up with thousands upon thousands of fireflies. There are a number of places in Malaysia where you can do this, I won't claim to know which one offers the "best" experience.

I picked a random spot in Malacca on Google Street View, and I’m immediately confronted with a food truck advertising, in English, “Luojia Stinky Tofu.”

From a brief google search it looks like that food truck is selling the Changsha variant of stinky tofu, which is a popular Chinese dish made by immersing tofu in a brine of fermented milk, meat and vegetables, then deep frying until it's black and crunchy on the outside. I have tried it before and think it's really good when done well, but isn't necessarily a core part of Malaysian cuisine (it's more associated with Mainland China). Still, it’s nice and there are a lot of very fermented foods in Malaysia that are worth trying, anything with shrimp paste in it for example - also, there's some Malaysian takes on stinky/fermented tofu as well.

This is a big ask, but if you're from the area, can you outline the general cultural and economic circumstances of each Southeast Asian country? I have thought that someday learning a language of Southeast Asia could be fun and enlightening on how other (poorer) cultures see the world, but I'm not sure which one yet. Indonesian/Malaysian seems like the easiest one of them, and it gets bonus points for being a relatively well off nation, sharing a language with Singapore, and also giving me some insight on how Islamists view reality.

The other option is using my kanji knowledge from Japanese to learn some Chinese, but I cracked open a textbook a few months ago and thought "dude, screw this".

Easy AAQC from me. You've made me nostalgic for a place I've never been, one that might never have been.

These straits cities are unpretentious places in a perennial state of glorious decay, swamped with humidity, buffeted by monsoons and assaulted with swarms of flies and mosquitoes, but the urban fabric blends an unimaginable number of disparate traditions together in a way that feels completely natural.

Great writing. Completely agree on Malacca. Malaysia is a very interesting place, I always enjoy my visits. You do feel the wealth / modernity fall off a cliff once you leave KL though. Where do you live now?

I currently live in Sydney and have for years, in general my opinion on it is quite positive. Unsurprisingly, the natural setting (specifically the harbour and the nearby Blue Mountains) is its main selling point. I'd say Australia is one of the best countries in the world you can visit for natural sights, I was surprised at how spectacular and genuinely untouched the whole continent is.

There's a ridiculous amount of wildlife in close proximity to Sydney. Kangaroos and wallabies and many colourful species of birds like rainbow lorikeets and sulphur-crested cockatoos are common sights. There are large colonies of flying foxes in Centennial Park, and you can sometimes see whales breaching off the coast during migration season. Combine that with nice weather, historic architecture like the Queen Victoria Building and Museum station, well-maintained infrastructure and transport, and you've got a city I like a lot.

Of course there are also many things I miss about Malaysia which simply don't exist elsewhere, most of which are documented above, and I can't say I don't get antsy and nostalgic sometimes.

Yeah, even Sydney can't compared to Georgetown for foodie culture. I have a friend who comes from a 'gula' Kampung near Penang on the mainland so I spent a fair bit of time there. The different Chinese/Malay 'foodcourts' are interesting and a lot of social fun for a meal.

Speaking of wildlife, you aren't wrong about monkeys just outside of the urban areas.

Sydney doesn't compare at all on the food front, but to be fair it's hard to compete with Malaysia. It's one of the most food-oriented countries I know of, and while that's a characteristic of many Asian cultures, here it's particularly emphasised. To provide food for someone is considered the ultimate display of affection - in contrast, it's not nearly as common for people to demonstrate affection through verbal or physical means, and when I first learned just how often Westerners say "I love you" to each other I genuinely thought it was unnecessary and over-the-top. But, treating them with food is non-negotiable. You can't go two minutes into a social situation without some uncle/aunty (in informal settings, virtually every older man/woman is endearingly referred to as an uncle/aunty regardless of their relation to you) concernedly asking you if you have eaten yet.

Street food is genuinely amazing, and a general rule is that virtually every good food haunt is going to be run out of a ridiculously dilapidated shophouse or a hawker stall. People are very selective and critical when evaluating what they like, and the impossibility of finding any truly authentic Malaysian food when overseas is a big sticking point for many Malaysians who emigrate. Including me.

To provide food for someone is considered the ultimate display of affection

You're doing yourself and Malaysia credit to speak in this way. I'm not a food or water guy, but I appreciate the offering of these things (even to those you don't like) as important.

I'm thinking in my western way that I want to push offering a safe haven to those around me I like.

And in the rare case, those I don't.

Court opinion:

  • A person lives on a property that sits directly on top of the line between Trimble County and Carroll County in Kentucky. Most of the house is in Carroll County, but the driveway and part of the house are in Trimble County. The property's deed, and two mortgages on the property, are recorded with the Carroll County clerk, and the property tax is paid to Carroll County. However, the person's driver license states that he resides in Trimble County, and he has voted in Trimble County in the four most recent elections.

  • The person buys on credit, registers, and titles a semi-truck in Trimble County. Accordingly, the creditor files a lien on the truck with the Trimble County clerk. However, when the person files for bankruptcy, he argues in bankruptcy court: he actually resides in Carroll County; since the lien was not filed in his county of residence, it is invalid under state law; and, therefore, the lien must be "avoided" (deleted) in the federal bankruptcy.

  • The bankruptcy judge agrees with the debtor and avoids the lien. A slight majority of the property is in Carroll County, so the deed was recorded in Carroll County, and that is conclusive proof of the debtor's county of residence under state law. State law incorporates "a policy of certainty in the recording of mortgages on both real and personal property", and allowing a person to pick and choose which of two counties is his county of residence would frustrate that policy. The debtor cannot be faulted for giving the wrong county of residence in the credit application, as (1) the application was only attested, not sworn, before a notary, and (2), if the application was not sworn, then under state law it was the creditor's responsibility to check the county of residence before filing the lien.

The debtor cannot be faulted for giving the wrong county of residence in the credit application, as (1) the application was only attested, not sworn, before a notary, and (2), if the application was not sworn, then under state law it was the creditor's responsibility to check the county of residence before filing the lien.

Would this be unjust enrichment in other states/if it occurred slightly differently?

This is the sort of rules-lawyering I'm never in favor of, even when it helps out "the common man". IMO the creditor "deserves" to take the truck, morally. The man falsely declared his county of residence, and checking his license (which I assume is the main way a dealer would confirm that information) would have backed that up. They should be allowed to re-file the lien in the proper county if it's that big a deal and reclaim the truck.

I think you're misunderstanding the situation here, to the extent that you think that the creditor wants to take the truck and that the man somehow benefits by declaring the incorrect county. The second idea can be dismissed quickly; this isn't a repossession, but a bankruptcy case in which the trustee is challenging the lien. The trustee's job is to sell property for the benefit of creditors. The trustee winning the action means the truck is going to get sold and the proceeds distributed among all the creditors named in the bankruptcy; the man doesn't get to keep the truck.

The other point is a bit more complicated, in that the creditor winning this action actually increases the chances that the man gets to keep the truck. If the creditor has a security interest in the truck, and there isn't enough equity for it to be worth it for the trustee to sell it, then the creditor has four options:

  1. He can ask the debtor to reaffirm the debt. The bankruptcy won't extinguish the creditor's security interest, but it will extinguish the debtor's personal obligation to pay. It's fairly common for bankrupts to have auto loans well in excess of the vehicle's value. After a reaffirmation the loan survives the bankruptcy, and the debtor continues to be personally liable for it, meaning that if they don't make the payments it could continue to affect their credit score and the creditor can continue to take collection actions (phone calls, letters, etc.). They can still repossess the car, and continue to hold the debtor for accountable for any shortage. They can go after the debtor's other assets to the extent that state law allows. This is almost always what auto creditors want you to do. When I did bankruptcy, debtors would occasionally ask about this because they needed a car and were pessimistic on their ability to get an auto loan after discharge. I told them up front that if they insisted on this they'd need to find another attorney, because I wouldn't do it, and trustees, who have to act in the best interests of the debtor as well as the creditors, have to approve and they're increasingly reluctant to allow these agreements outside of the rare cases when they make sense.

  2. The creditor can repossess the truck. This happens fairly often, but not as often as you'd might think. Again, a lot of car loans are underwater, so getting the car is a consolation prize. Furthermore, the creditor has no idea what kind of condition the vehicle is in, mileage, etc. And repossession isn't free. They have to hire a tow truck to pick up the car. They then have to find somewhere to store it, assuming the bank manager's house isn't an option. It's probably going to be sold at a dealer auction, where it won't fetch anywhere near it's market value. The fact that the truck in this case is a commercial vehicle complicates things even further, as the incidental costs are larger, the market is smaller, and things like DOT safety standards make it third-party purchase riskier. Again, it's a consolation prize.

  3. The creditor can redeem the truck. This is only available in the event that the loan is underwater. Say he owes $50,000 and the truck is only worth $30,000. If he can come up with $30,000 cash he can have the truck for that amount. This is a better deal for the creditor than repossession, since it avoids all of the incidental expenses and risk of selling below market. The downside is that it requires the debtor to come up with a lot of cash at a time when they, almost by definition, aren't doing well financially. It makes the most sense when the vehicle is only worth, like, a few thousand dollars that the debtor can save up while the bankruptcy is pending. There are also companies that offer redemption loans, but these almost always have ridiculously high interest rates, though they may be worth it if the car is worth keeping.

  4. The final option is called a "ride through". This was technically eliminated by the 2005 bankruptcy reforms, but it's made a comeback in the form of the "back door ride through" and the realities of the situation. It used to be that the bankruptcy code prohibited a creditor from seizing collateral after discharge, so long as the loan was current. What this meant was that, if the loan was current at the time of filing, you could just continue making payments and keep the car. Since there was no formal affirmation, if you couldn't afford the payments or just wanted a new car, you could stop paying at any time without detriment to your own financial position. While the bankruptcy code no longer affords debtors this protection, a number of state laws still prohibit creditors from seizing collateral when payments are current. Furthermore, remember that repossession isn't free. The banks pushed for this reform because they thought it would lead to more affirmations. It actually led to more repossessions.

Unfortunately for them, this push was based on what they thought they wanted, but after several years it became clear that the economics didn't make sense. It costs the banks about $500 per reaffirmation in legal costs and filing fees. So 100 affirmations costs them $50,000. If the default rate is 10%, then it's costing them $50,000 to pursue ten delinquencies. And what do they actually get for that? Well, they already had the right of repossession, so all they're really getting is the right to sue people who filed bankruptcy in the past few years. Tack on more legal fees, and add into it the fact that most of these people aren't going to have many recoverable assets, and it doesn't look too good. Even in the best case scenario, where they can collect every judgment in full and there are no additional legal fees, it's unlikely that the total value of the suits is going to add up to what they paid—they could be paying $50,000 for the right to collect $30,000. And since reaffirmation is such a bad deal for the debtor, they're now forced to repossess on a lot of loans where they might have otherwise been paid in full.

So in addition to your attorney warning against it and the trustee skeptical at best, we now have the situation where reaffirmation might not even be an option. I know that Ford Motor Credit still follows the letter of the law and insists on reaffirmation, and local credit unions often do because of complicated cross-collateralization agreements and the fact that they seem to take things personally. But otherwise, most debtors who aren't behind on payments end up keeping the car.

Agreed that the creditor should be able to refile. I don’t know the terminology well enough to say if that is true.

But that doesn’t mean this was an unjust verdict! He lives in a weird edge case where the codified law says one thing and the title paperwork say another. He shouldn’t be held responsible for a mistake on the county’s forms.

Just to be clear, the creditor can't refile. Once the debtor files for bankruptcy, any collection actions for existing debts are automatically stayed, barring a court order to lift the stay. These orders are usually only granted if there is a secured debt, e.g. a mortgage or car loan. A judge is never going to lift the stay to allow an unsecured creditor to file a lien against the debtor. Doing this would completely subvert the intention of the bankruptcy code, since bankruptcy, with certain rare exceptions, can't remove any liens that exist at the time of filing. If they were allowed to do this then every unsecured creditor would sue the debtor and get a judgment against them, converting the unsecured debt to a secured debt, making discharge impossible. As I explained below, the debtor gains nothing from the banks error, and possibly even suffers a bit himself. The bank is supposed to be the sophisticated party here but they fucked up because they didn't comply with the relatively straightforward safe harbor provisions. I don't have much sympathy for them.

He lives in a weird edge case where the codified law says one thing and the title paperwork say another. He shouldn’t be held responsible for a mistake on the county’s forms.

I think that this moves beyond a simple mistake in government forms, and goes into wilful fraud. He claimed to be living in county A, votes in county A, presented a license from county A. But then, when it advantages him, he claims to live in county B. He seems to have known the whole time that he technically lived in county B, and took advantage of the government confusion so that he could dodge his obligation.

Based on the facts, I think it is safe to assume that the borrower didn’t knowingly mislead the creditor here. The plaintiff is the trustee for the bankrupt borrower, meaning the debtor is not directing the action. The trustee’s job is to find every avenue of relief permissible under the law. Given that the borrower is a truck driver in rural Kentucky, living in a trailer home, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that he is probably not a sophisticated borrower who knew the nuances of title registration law when negotiating with the bank.

This is likely an instance of the trustee’s attorney finding a technical argument on behalf of the bankrupt estate with no bad faith involved in the creation of the loan.

Notably, the creditor here does not lose the debt claim, they just move from secured to unsecured creditor status and can recover from the general assets of the bankrupt party along with other unsecured creditors. The borrower doesn’t get a free truck here, and the bank is only left out in the lurch to the extent that the other unsecured creditors share in the assets.

The plaintiff is the trustee for the bankrupt borrower, meaning the debtor is not directing the action. The trustee’s job is to find every avenue of relief permissible under the law.

Gotcha, I didn't catch that detail. I thought that this was a case where the borrower himself was claiming his residence was different once he was in bankruptcy court.

I would also clarify that the upshot here isn't that the debtor gets to keep the truck. For the sake of argument, let's assume that sale of the truck will recover $50,000 after fees, which amount is exactly the same as the lien Creditor A claims against it. This is the only property of the estate available for distribution. Let's also assume that the debtor has $100,000 in total debt, and that the other $50,000 is from an unsecured loan from Creditor B. This is a straight Chapter 7 liquidation. If Creditor A's lien is valid, then Creditor a gets the full $50,000 proceeds and Creditor B gets nothing. Since the court ruled the lien was invalid, there's now $50,000 to be split between two unsecured creditors, and each would get $25,000.

checking his license (which I assume is the main way a dealer would confirm that information) would have backed that up

As I wrote above, his driver's license was in the wrong county as well. Only his house's deed and mortgages were in the correct county.

Yes, that's what I mean - if they verified his address by checking his license (which I would assume the standard would be), it would back up his statement that he's from Trimble, not Carroll. If someone says they're from Trimble, their license says they're from Trimble, and the car they're buying from you is registered and titled in Trimble, I don't think the dealer should be culpable for the lien being placed in Trimble.

Under Kentucky, law, they aren't; that's the purpose of the safe harbor provision. The problem is that they didn't comply with the safe harbor provision by only getting an attestation rather than a sworn declaration. To be clear, all an attestation is is a verification by the notary that the person whose signature is on the document is the person who signed it. The change would have been trivial to make at the time of signing, and the bank shouldn't be exempt from the consequences of not following the law.

I thought one of the main purposes of property registration regimes - including car titles - was certainty around liens. If the car is titled in Trimble, a lien against it in Trimble should be valid regardless of where the owner lives. Anything else leads to an absurdity, as the instant case demonstrates.

I'm not going to defend Kentucky's system of vehicle registration, because it's dumb. In PA and Ohio at least, liens are recorded in the county where the vehicle is registered, period. In PA it isn't even recorded at the courthouse, just with the DOT, which makes sense since the records aren't public anyway due to Federal law. The legislature had a chance to change it but they put a safe harbor provision in instead. That being said, the court can't just ignore the system that exists because they'd prefer a better system. The bank is the sophisticated party here, and they should know, understand, and follow the law as it exists, at peril of their lien not being recognized. I have no sympathy for them.

According to the opinion, Kentucky's policy has held otherwise since 1914 (Burbank & Burbank v. Robek) at the latest.

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This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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