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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   2076 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 9, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Late for a small scale question- might repost on this Sunday’s thread- but does anyone know of speculative fiction or essays from the eighties about computers in the mid term future, and how they affect society in non-apocalyptic ways? Obviously there’s Terminator, but computers were a big deal at the time and I kind of want to see how sober minded people forecast them to affect society?

William Gibson seems like an obvious choice. He was writing stories about the internet before the internet even existed. The Burning Chrome anthology and the Sprawl trilogy would be your best bet for those.

Are there any Trump voters here who have been disappointed in the direction the Trump administration is heading in, particularly with respect to the economy? The stock market took a beating today.

I really don't intend to be snarky here because even in hindsight, it's still very reasonable to argue that Trump was a preferable vote to Harris. It's just that there must have been a better way to go about things, and not torpedoing the economy is a good place to start.

I was going to ask a related question:

How much of the market drop and the apparent crisis(es) are the result of negative media coverage? Anything and everything the administration does is seen as a violation of something or other.

"News Today: Fascist still in White House doing things, when will the carnage end? Breaking Update: during a vital meeting, trump used the bathroom and delayed lifesaving aid to [minority]>."

I'm still convinced that this happened during COVID. With any other administration, the media wouldn't have been motivated to keep hammering on the fear, the vaccines would have been an excuse to end the lockdowns, and you wouldn't see masked-up leftists to this day. Being deathly afraid of COVID was bound up with being a good little resistance member.

That said, I didn't even vote in this election and don't personally like Trump; he melted my dad's brain, among other wrongs. I'm disappointed at the Musk lying and tomfoolery; this isn't even good trolling. It feels like someone somewhere made a monkey-paw wish to defeat wokeness and this is what they got. I worry it might have been me.

I really just wanted the crypto market to go up, thanks to fair/reasonable/clear regulation and institutional buy-in. A Bitcoin reserve is fundamentally a good idea. I want a future where putting 5-10% of your assets/investments in crypto is boring safe, conventional wisdom that it'd be irresponsible not to follow, like bonds or whatever. Trumpcoin doesn't further that goal.

How much of the market drop and the apparent crisis(es) are the result of negative media coverage?

I'd say we've been due for a crash for quite a while, and I'm surprised we've been able to keep it up for this long.

First of all, this hour's stock ticker is not "the economy". If you failed to notice for the last 200 or so years, the stock market is volatile. What happens to "the economy" remains to be seen in much longer timeframes than a couple of days. And that's btw why it is wrong for most people to engage in active trading - they trade with their feelings and not their brains (as they do most of the other things too, including - unfortunately - voting) and unless they happen to be exceptionally gifted or exceptionally lucky, they get taken to the cleaners.

I personally am not 100% happy with how Trump is handling foreign policy. The whole Ukraine thing remains very far from both "peace in 24 hours", which obviously nobody believed in, and any peace deal at all, and his actions do not seem so far to yield any results there. I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and judge by the results, but unless any positive result happens soon, I must conclude the whole thing was a big failure for him. In general, he seems to have an idea of himself being this yuge peacemaker, but there are places which are not ready for peace, and trying to make peace by force there only makes things worse. It's pretty much a tradition for this to happen to Israel, and Trump doesn't seem to help there too by conducting parallel negotiations with Hamas. Same with Iran, which doesn't seem to be open to peace, so why bother? The whole Canada thing seems to be totally unnecessary - while I understand why one would want to rough up Mexico a bit with regard to what is happening on the south border, I don't see the northern border as a big priority and I don't see any use in a public fight with Canada - moreover, it could help the Left to stay in power there, which is a stupid strategic blunder, there's not many non-leftist governments in the West.

I am not disappointed with his approach on dismantling the taxes-to-GONGOs pipeline but the real battles are ahead. The budget is stuffed with all kinds of pork and spending targeted at enriching special interests, and Republicans' hands are as much in this cookie jar as Democrats are. It's one thing to cut off a woke NGO and another thing to cut off a subsidy that a Republican district benefits from. If the latter is not done, than there's no hope for any real change in budget deficits. I would still see disrupting the flow of grift money as the positive, but whether or not it will fix a real fundamental problems and whether Trump administration ends up to fundamentally reverse the course or just be a flash in a pan and the next Democrat president would just reverse everything he has done in a week - that remains to be seen. I also am happy he's taking serious steps to dismantle the DEI system, hopefully he does enough damage to it to make it hard to recover in the future. It will likely try to resurrect and reassert itself after Trump is gone, but hopefully not in a comprehensive envelope that is has been up to now, when every major company or organization must have a big DEI department and every scientific work has to have at least one section describing how it helps a preferred DEI cause. I am very interested in his efforts of reasserting the power of the executive over the unknown (this is literally true, nobody knows how many of them even exist) number of government offices that so far have been pretty much living their own lives controlled by nobody and doing whatever the hell they want. The major battles in this campaign are in the future, and likely to be fought in SCOTUS, and I hope he manages to get some good lawyers on his side, because the other side will fight him very hard on that. But at least he's trying.

I am also not sure what he is doing with tariffs makes sense. He has some bold ideas, but I am not sure they are thought through enough to actually produce results that he expects, or the ones I'd like. In some places - like established grift pipelines - the disruption itself is a good thing, but in other places just shaking things up is not enough.

As a libertarian, Trump is very far from being my ideal candidate, and I always knew that. But domestically, so far he's doing better than I expected, though it is very tentative given how little time has passed. I'd wait at least a year to make some conclusions. In the foreign policy, so far it has been rather disappointing (I don't count border control etc. as foreign policy) - while kicking Europe's asses enough to make them finally wake up and smell the Russian bear at their doorstep is encouraging, it's not enough. Unless he delivers some results - and that would require making a turn from disrupting to dealmaking - I don't see him as winning there. I am not regretting my vote, but I am certainly regretting his choices there so far.

I am very interested in his efforts of reasserting the power of the executive over the unknown (this is literally true, nobody knows how many of them even exist) number of government offices that so far have been pretty much living their own lives controlled by nobody and doing whatever the hell they want.

What offices are these?

All kinds of things like CFPB which has recently been in the headlines, but there are a ton of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_agencies_of_the_United_States_federal_government and at least some of them seem to be under impression that they are not responsible to anyone. While there may make some sense for agencies like the Fed for which independence from the fleeting passions of day-to-day executive operations may be a very important feature, for most of the agencies I think being isolated from control by executive also means being isolated from control by pretty much anything. That was especially bad combined with Chevron deference, which means basically the agency, at least within its own domain, is the supreme sovereign without any check on their power. Even with that gone, having a myriad of agencies inside the government that basically conduct their own policy without any input from anywhere does not feel right.

Assuming the current administrations statements on them were accurate, wasn't USAID literally that?

I, personally, am regretting my vote. Taking a chainsaw to the government was something I thought was just rhetoric, not something he'd actually do. I also didn't expect Elon to be doing so much direct chainsaw-ing, since he was just supposed to be an advisory role. In addition, I have never liked the executive overreach that often comes with abusing executive orders, and there has been a lot of that. How am I supposed to view his birthright citizenship executive order any differently from the New Mexican governor's executive order declaring gun violence a state of emergency, or Biden's executive order canceling student loan debt? How am I supposed to take a White House statement written like this seriously? Why did they cede sounding professional to the Democrats? ETA: The decision on national parks is also incredibly baffling. It doesn't cost that much. If he also axes federal lands, people who like to hunt in flyover territory are going to be affected the most by not having federal land to hunt on.

But the foreign policy has been the worst of it. Even if Zelensky was overstepping his bounds on a deal already agreed upon, surely there were better ways of handling it than getting into a shouting match over whether he's appreciative enough or not. The tariff baiting is another thing; shit or get off the pot. I'm not even entirely opposed to tariffs, though obviously they are going to hurt; this is just getting the worst of both worlds, though. And then the stuff about annexing or buying these other countries, like you said. Pointlessly antagonistic. And then aligning himself so closely to Elon Musk, who is a powder keg with questionable mental stability and intelligence, judging from how he handled the Nazi salute, the AfD endorsement, the time when Community Notes disagreed with him, and more. And the leaving NATO and the UN thing, and pulling troops out of Germany, and more. I'm pretty sick of all of it.

I never would have voted for Kamala Harris, ever. But the next candidate from the Republicans will have to disavow at least some of this stuff for me to vote for them again. I will just go back to pointlessly voting Libertarian again.

I also don't know how much complaining I would have if I was nearly this politically active during his first term. Maybe he was always this bad?

Okay, I keep thinking of things to add, and the mods probably don't appreciate over-editing of comments. The Zelensky thing wasn't as bad as withholding arms shipments to Ukraine that were already approved by Congress. And the withholding of military intelligence to the Ukrainians. Seems like these both led to the Russians pushing and taking Kursk. Trump responded by threatening even more sanctions against Russia, which is even stupider decision making -- how much are more sanctions going to do, and weren't you just talking about lifting sanctions? Better yet, you could have just not halted things unconstitutionally just to give red meat for your base that apparently wants you to be aggressive on Ukraine?

The Congress does not approve arms shipments though. They authorize the President to use allocated money - or, rather, usually the existing stock within the limits of allocated money - to send the shipments, but the actual shipments are entirely within the discretion of the President and Secretary of State. It is entirely constitutional and within President's authority to stop those shipments temporarily or even permanently - there's no demand for the President to spend all the money or any part of it. See for example: https://www.state.gov/bureau-of-political-military-affairs/use-of-presidential-drawdown-authority-for-military-assistance-for-ukraine for reference. If you enjoy this kind of thing, check out the actual text of the FAA, it specifically spells out that the President is the one who makes the determination.

People have taken a habit lately to use "unconstitutional" as a replacement for "anything that anybody does and I don't like" but that word actually has a meaning, and that's not what it means. You may hate what Trump does, and it's completely within your rights to do so, but there's absolutely nothing "unconstitutional" (the Constitution doesn't say much about it in any case) or illegal in his actions. If you're going to criticize him, at least bother to get some facts correct.

I see. I was not aware of this. My apologies. Yes, still a shockingly bad decision, but not unconstitutional (in this case).

I support:

  • Reorientation of Russia/Ukraine policy

  • Offering asylum to white South Africans (assuming he actually follows through on that)

  • Strengthened border enforcement and ICE raids

  • DOGE and the general plan of reshaping the civil service / deep state to be more right-leaning

I oppose:

  • The bizarre threats towards Canada and Greenland
  • The crackdown on pro-Palestine protesters

I'm neutral/unsure about:

  • Threats to withdraw from NATO
  • Tariffs

So overall I'm still happy with my vote. No regrets. Honestly nothing earth-shattering has really happened yet, we're largely still in "nothing ever happens" territory despite what the breathless 24 hour news cycle would have you believe about the "abdication of American soft power".

A lot of the stock market is probably fake and gay anyway and as others have pointed out a correction could be healthy in the long run.

What exactly about the civil services offered by the government are "left leaning"? And more importantly, what actions are "right leaning"?

Giving workers training in various forms of Critical Theory (from race to gender) sounds pretty left wing to me, and stopping that would be right-leaning by comparison, off the top of my head. One could also imagine a "equal but opposite reaction" where right-wing values are taught at workshops instead.

What are "right-wing values"?

Order, cohesion, justice, tradition... there's a whole bunch, "right-wing" is a broad category so which values are held by whom, and to what degree, is going to vary. You could also write an entire essay on what exactly is meant by each one, so I don't know what sort of answer you're expecting here.

Well, I agree it's all down to subjective opinion, so I just wanted to know what yours are.

DOGE and the general plan of reshaping the civil service / deep state to be more right-leaning

Is that what's happening though? From my perspective, I've observed the following:

  • First, all of the people tasked with carrying out this administration's agenda are political appointees. This means that all of these people can easily be replaced in four or even eight years.

  • Second, and relatedly, I don't think there is a plan to make the civil service more right-leaning, and even if there is such a plan, it would be ineffective because nearly all of the people being fired are either not performing tasks that could be described as either left or right or the tasks they perform change with agency policy, which again, is a product of political appointment. Further, if the goal is to create a more right-leaning civil service, why are the most right-leaning government agencies (Veterans Affairs and Defense) facing the deepest cuts? Instead, I think the plan is to create the appearance that you've significantly shrunk the size of the government by firing tens of thousands of people (maybe in the low hundreds of thousands when all is said and done) and cutting "waste" and "fraud". However, neither of things actually affect the national debt in any significant way or drastically change the political orientation of the country in the long-term.

  • Lastly, and most importantly, there does not appear to be a deep state, or at least the deep state is nothing like what its proponents claimed it was. Consider the deepest of the alleged deep state operations: foreign policy. Trump has been able to upend the global order unilaterally and with virtually no resistance. Decades of carefully crafted alliances and policy are being thrown out the window and there are not secret operatives in the shadows stopping this. In a way, this is a massive blackpill for some Trump supporters because it demonstrates that everything done so far can just be reversed under a Democratic administration.

Lastly, and most importantly, there does not appear to be a deep state, or at least the deep state is nothing like what its proponents claimed it was. Consider the deepest of the alleged deep state operations: foreign policy. Trump has been able to upend the global order unilaterally and with virtually no resistance.

Last time he was in the White House, Army generals were bragging to the press about giving false information to their commander-in-chief. If there was no deep state, such a thing would be unthinkable, or immediately, and he would be free to do all what he's doing now 8 years ago. The fact that he's able to pull it off now, after 4 years of consolidating a coalition within the US government proves the opposite of what you're claiming.

And US defense officials bypassed Obama when they shared intelligence with allies who then shared it with Assad. There were multiple instances during the Obama administration where generals publicly disagreed with him and were accused of undermining him (especially with re to Afghanistan and Syria), including when McChrystal and his staff made comments to Rolling Stone against senior White House officials. If your definition of the deep state is the military undermining the President, that was a phenomenon well before Trump's first term. That's just politics.

I think the fact that Trump has been able completely redefine the parameters of American foreign policy is evidence against the type of deep state pushed by right wingers.

And US defense officials bypassed Obama when they shared intelligence with allies who then shared it with Assad.

Correct, Obama was also frustrated by the deep state on several occasions.

I think the fact that Trump has been able completely redefine the parameters of American foreign policy is evidence against the type of deep state pushed by right wingers.

Do you think you can restate the idea of the deep state pushed by the right-wingers, in a way that the right-wingers will recognize as their own?

The extraordinary US asset pricing bubble has had its long-overdue correction postponed for five years now. We are long past due, and while the market can stay irrational for a very long time, there has never been a permanently high plateau, to borrow a fateful phrase.

It was therefore likely that whoever won in 2024 was going to be president during a big repricing and associated severe recession (which may well be postponed further, but which I’m confident will happen before 2029 - though I have been wrong before). The question is whether Trump might be worth it.

What kind of Democratic Party will win in 2028? Gavin himself is a blank vessel with no real beliefs. But it is possible - in my view, likely - that Trump might cause the Democratic Party to profoundly rethink policy on a number of fronts in a way that makes a future Dem administration more amenable than a hypothetical Hillary / Harris / Biden II admin, especially on social policy.

There is a pretty straight line between the tariffs and the markets' reassessment of near term, and long term, growth prospects. The AI stuff feels like a bubble to me, but the reason things keep going down is that it keepa looking like the Trump administration is actually going to follow through on the tariff thing. I don't know what delusion they are operating under that they think it will work out long term; this is spectacularly ill-conceived and badly executed policy.

I knew that he would be pro-Israel but it’s a little too much for me. Cutting 500mil funds to a university because their students protest against Israel, not releasing the Epstein files, and now trying to primary Thomas Massie is too much. At this point I’m willing to become a loyal Democrat if they come out strongly against Israel.

Pro-DEI, high taxes, mass immigration, affirmative action but anti-Israel, or the inverse? (If you say ‘we’re getting both anyway’, that wasn’t the question).

My first priority is “White population doesn’t go down + they aren’t discriminated against”. My second priority is that Israel doesn’t exert undue influence on us, and instead we exert it on them. But if Trump continues to be so comically submissive to them I will temporarily flip my priorities around. Also, new information I’ve learned on the Mennonite birth rates in South America make me care a little less about White TFR (eg in this century they will make up most births in Bolivia).

My first priority is “White population doesn’t go down + they aren’t discriminated against”.

Can you expand on this?

What is there to expand that you haven’t already read on the forum? The White share in the countries they founded is trending downward rapidly. I don’t want it to, which is justified by personal taste, the science of evolution, and the evidence that countries are better with more of these people in it. Also, I don’t want people of White ancestry discriminated against in institutions or in the origin stories foisted upon them in education. This means that a middle class white person will never have a position taken by a wealthier minority person of similar ability due to diversity, and it means that there is nothing negative taught about White people in school which isn’t counterbalanced by negative stories about minorities. When these primary things are met, which are upstream of most of the things I care about, then I have the luxury to care about the more trivial matters of the economy and geopolitical reach.

Mennonite birth rates in South America make me care a little less about White TFR (eg in this century they will make up most births in Bolivia).

Too early to tell. It might be that the modern malady is simply taking a little longer to catch up to them. Of course I hope it doesn't.

Not sure if it’s too early to tell, really — it’s consistently high, provided there’s available farmland. What definitely is too early to tell, however, is whether the Amish or Mennonite who leave agriculture will continue to have a high birth rate. Or maybe there’s already a study on that which I need to read.

The not-particularly-strict Mennonites that I know seem to maintain the same sort of lifestyle when they start construction or other businesses -- I'm pretty sure it's mostly the church and community support. Whether they can maintain this is another story -- I don't really know any "urban Mennonites", or if that's even a thing.

I'm disappointed with the way he's treated US allies. Or maybe I should say "ex-allies".

Tariffs are a good idea but aimed at the wrong countries. Better to fight financial wars than the kind that leave young men in wheelchairs or in the ground. But why Canada of all things?

On the topic of economy, numbers tend to randomly go up or down. Neither economists nor governments seem to know what they're doing or have much control so I think it's best to not look at the stock market much.

Doge and anti-DEI efforts seem to be going pretty well.

Overall, I still think he's overwhelmingly a better candidate than Harris, even if he makes embarrassing and bizarre mistakes like antagonizing Zelensky.

Yes. Trump has accomplished my top priorities, but I'm disappointed in his economic policies.

If The Donald wrecks the economy enough to ensure blue landslide, then nothing of this would matter.

Trump voter and generally disappointed, especially with tariffs. It's not that any of his bad economic policies are a surprise. Its a bit of a toss up of whether he is worse than the alternative. The Democrats tend to have lots of dumb but relatively small impact bad economic policies. Trump just has the one big policy of tariffs that is very dumb.

Trump just has the one big policy of tariffs that is very dumb.

Not a surprise. He campaigned on this.

I'm in the "economy is coming down either way" camp and when I expected Harris to win my thought was that at least she'll take the blame, but here we are.

Re: Trump's direction, it's complicated. On the one hand it's amazing to see what it looks like for an administration to go all-out. On the other hand so much is happening so fast that it's dizzying in a way that's closer to scary than fun. Have they made a ton of missteps? You bet. I'm chalking that up to cost of actually doing something.

Yes, but I more or less expected this. I still think he has been better than a potential Harris administration, so I don't really regret my vote.

Let's say I'm put in charge of a government-sponsored group tasked with ensuring newborn babies come out of the womb as close as possible to a fully functioning member of society. Ideally this means they can walk, talk, feed themselves, etc. I have unlimited resources and there are no IRBs to stop experimentation. I have also gained immortality so I can see this project through to its completion.

What is the general procedure to get babies closer to self-reliance and how close do you think they could get?

(I've always wondered why we seem to be some of the only animals in the kingdom to not be self-sufficient immediately upon birth and what we can do about it.)

How do you define the boundary between the infant and the rest of the world? Would it count to have an exosuit which can recognize and fulfill the needs of the infant, communicate the specifics of the infant's needs and desires to others, and offer further functionality which the infant can learn to use?

The primary limitation is the size of the birth canal. In places where more births are by C-section due to local fads e.g. Brazil, the average skull size of newborns is slowly increasing, or so I have been led to believe. If you had working artificial wombs, therefore, it stands to reason that you could have bigger brained and more capable babies, though presumably with a longer gestation time, similar to elephants.

Uh.. Is keeping the babies in the "womb" for far longer a valid option? Maybe an artificial womb that really knows how to stretch, till they're there for half a decade while in immersive VR.

For all the ranges of intelligence known to occur naturally in mankind, including the most prodigious of geniuses, they all came out as wailing and useless babies. They only really distinguished themselves after at least a couple years of growth.

You'd probably need some kind of strong genetic editing, an ability to force ultra-rapid cognitive maturation in-utero, some kind of BCI that could pump knowledge by the bucket load into a fetal brain. Even then, getting them to be remotely useful at birth while even being vaguely human strikes me as unlikely.

Human babies are actually pretty middle of the pack in terms of self-reliance for mammals- calves can walk, but new puppies can’t see or hear.

There are biological limitations on how much more precocial human babies can be without killing the mother in the process of birth. I suspect we’re pretty close to them, and genetic engineering would be better aimed at faster development in the first year or two.

Of course if you’re trying to decant supermen, fully grown, I’d say… about three in terms of development. Able to comprehend language, the toilet, feeding themselves, etc. You know, you’d still have to teach them those things. ‘Using a spoon’ and ‘going in the toilet instead of wherever’ and ‘the English language’ are not instincts and it’s probably impossible to make them instincts.

and ‘the English language’ are not instincts

Yes, you're correct, though proclivity toward English is almost certainly there in the genes. Which I mention because I think it's so cool and a window into so much else.

proclivity toward English is almost certainly there in the genes.

Why is this almost certain?

Inasmuch as 'being good with a given language' is under selection pressure, populations will evolve to be better at that language.

Check this out. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-024-00229-7

To summarize, this study revealed the genetic basis of Chinese and English abilities in a group of Chinese bilingual children.

There's more research on this sort of thing but it's difficult to find and often gets disappeared.

The problem is that English today isn't the same as "English" circa AD 1000, so it's not clear to me why there would be a long lasting coherent selection pressure. In fact, English today is a result of changes made to the language by its speakers over the past thousand years, so it's really not clear which way causality even runs.

I'd be much more interested in a survey of English ability of third generation Chinese immigrants in the US rather than bilingual kids in a bilingual country. I strongly suspect that the effect will be small or even in the other direction due to Asian IQ.

The problem is that English today isn't the same as "English" circa AD 1000, so it's not clear to me why there would be a long lasting coherent selection pressure.

Selection doesn't require a thousand years. It happens in each generation. And particularly with industrialism and a shift to an information economy, it's going hard. Besides which, English and Chinese are a lot more like their thousand year old selves than they are like each other. So, sure, call the matter directional.

In fact, English today is a result of changes made to the language by its speakers over the past thousand years, so it's really not clear which way causality even runs.

Statements like this freak me out. Of course it's both! You might like this: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0610848104

Why is LGBTQ so important for liberals in terms of foreign policy?

For example, when debating Russia, arguments often amount to Russia is evil because they aren't onboard with pride. Russia isn't putting LGBTQAASASFDSFDSFDSFDSFSD people in concentration camps, they simply seem not to have pride flags while having a don't ask don't tell attitude. Why does that infuriate liberals that much?

Countries in the middle east can engage in all sorts of questionable behaviour but, often it is a lack of LGBTQ flags that infuriates the left. Again, they aren't mass-executing LGBTQ people or having concentrations camps, they simply don't celebrate it or want it rubbed in people's faces.

It seems like existence of pride parades seems to be a key benchmark for judging the moral virtue of a country. Why is this benchmark so central?

So, can you elaborate what "want it rubbed in people's faces" means? Because that's probably where you're going to find the answer to your question, since "not rubbing it in people's faces" includes

  • making it illegal for individuals to "promote homosexuality"
  • making same-sex couples and households headed by same-sex couples ineligible for the legal protections available to opposite-sex couples
  • not allowing transgender adults to change their legal gender and
  • banning all gender-affirming care
  • making it illegal for people suffering from gender dysphoria to adopt children
  • changing the status of marriages by a trans individual with a person who shares the same birth sex as them to nullified
  • defining violent criminal acts carried out against LGBT people as criminal offences under Russian law such that fact that crimes which are motivated by the sexual orientation or gender identity of the victim is not considered an aggravating factor when the court determines the sentence
  • providing no anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ people and having no designation for hate crimes based on sexual orientation and gender identity
  • deeming the distribution of "materials promoting LGBTQ relationships" to minors, which was then updated in 2022 to extend to apply to anyone regardless of age, thus making any expression deemed a promotion of non-traditional sexual relationships illegal
  • ruling the international LGBTQ movement to be "extremist", outlawing it in the country, the the proceeding day sending security forces to raid bars, male saunas and nightclubs across Moscow
  • ruling homosexual acts between consenting males were against the law until 1993
  • never approving a request to hold a gay pride rally

Hopefully you can see why that would infuriate anyone, much less liberals, and how it appears a little more than "simply don't celebrate it".

The problem with this is exactly what you've done here- complain about things liberals-as-in-freedom would normally have problems with yet have the intention of smuggling a bunch of progressive idpol stuff in.

In this case, you've conflated standard free speech issues with "and that's why they need special protection" (which in practice is only ever applied in a way that favors Western progressives- we can argue over is-ought, but the best way to avoid abuse of a carve-out is to not have one in the first place) and "actually yes, the government should pretend men are women" (antisocial behaviors have a bimodal distribution).

So denying the frame to the progressives by 'ruling the international LGBTQ movement to be "extremist"' is, trivially, the correct answer- the solution if your nation is looking to make relations between straights and everyone else better is always something homegrown.

Hopefully you can see why that would infuriate anyone, much less liberals

I wholeheartedly support every single bullet point you have here, and so do a whole lot of people in the US.

I wholeheartedly don't support every single bullet point I have here, and so do a whole lot of other people in the US, too. I suppose we cancel eachother out.

The question is whether those things would 'infuriate anyone' and the answer is clearly not.

That is one answer. I think another answer can be that people think they aren't infuriated by those things but, in fact, are.

Would you say your argument is that there's a consensus on these points, even if a few people disagree?

I think another answer can be that people think they aren't infuriated by those things but, in fact, are.

What's the logic here? Are you arguing that people like @TitaniumButterfly are lying when they claim to not be infuriated? Is it some form of false consciousness that would be dispelled were these bullet points implemented locally?0

I think we are working from radically-different premises and should probably not share a government.

At the trivial level, it's something that's immediate, either in firsthand matters or in terms of someone they know. Yes, ostensibly these countries usually focus most enforcement on places where other legal jeopardy turns on less objectionable focuses (and actually avoid getting international tourists involved), but it's somewhat sobering to pack for a trip and put back the sex toy or leave behind a fanfic-in-progress after realizing that you'd be depending on that enforcement 'prioritization' to avoid serious jail time or worse.

And while the various polls about progressives thinking everyone in the political party is gay are kinda hilarious, they're downstream of enough of that one-in-twenty-ish that everyone knows a good few pretty closely.

At the more intermediate level, it's something that ends up with epicycles built around it. Russia doesn't just ban The Gays or pride parades, it bans 'propaganda' about The Gays, has a whole bunch of cultural stuff about stuff that hints of gayishness, and then there's an unofficial brigade of people with a lot of practical support among the police that don't mind if individual gays have Particularly Bad Safety Incidents.

It's a bit like how some rightwingers get really focused on HBD or religious freedom or (in my example) gun rights, even if they're not personally in the pinch point, because the support and actions for these policies end up fractally wrong, too. This usually runs into limitations sooner than liberals expect -- Qatar Airlines isn't cutting scenes out of Mitchels v. The Machines, since even if they cared that much they wouldn't see a lot of the subtext or short-of-bright-flashing-lights text -- but it doesn't stop at don't ask don't tell, either.

The deeper issue is that it's something that a) has basically zero organized internal opposition within the progressive movement, with only a tiny fragment of often-nutty people willing to tolerate disagreement with mainstream progressive pro-LGBT matters, and b) has external domestic opposition, of which the behaviors of external opponents becomes a useful banner. If Uganda has the death penalty for homosexuality (kinda, insert thirty asterisks here), and American social conservatives can be linked to these positions in general (again, asterisks), you don't have to limit your focus on what domestic policies those social conservatives might actually be trying to implement; you can tell everyone What They Really Want To Do To You (asterisk).

Why is LGBTQ so important for liberals in terms of foreign policy?

It's easy.

Fixing an unequal economy is hard. Freeing a lower racial caste means bad things are going to happen and people will be harmed.

Letting two girls kiss or two dudes get married costs nothing.

That’s like asking why conservatives are so angry about electric vehicles. It turns out they have the bandwidth to judge more than one thing at once.

People who hate Russia’s stance on homosexuality probably also distrust it for invading Ukraine, repressing political dissidents, and generally pretending that it’s still the Cold War. Sometimes one or another is in the news. In this case, it appears to be due to updated laws criminalizing the rainbow flag as comparable to al-Qaeda, Aum Shinrikyo, the Azov Battalion, and…Meta.

To be fair, I am baffled by conservatives being mad about electric vehicles. I had a conversation with my dad where we talked about my wife's electric car, and Dad said he would never get one. Which I said makes sense, as he lives on a farm so he has very different car needs than my wife and I do. He replied that even if his car usage was different such that it made sense to get an electric car, he still wouldn't get one.

I didn't get into it with him cause I value family harmony, but I just can't understand that mindset. Why not get an electric car if it makes sense for your needs? Just to own the libs or something? It seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face to me. I get opposing electric car mandates. I get not getting electric if the cost-benefit analysis isn't favorable. But I don't get opposing electric on principle.

Opposing electricity is encouraged in communities that encourage being personally prepared, from my anecdotal experience. The common conception is that in an apocalypse/national emergency/act of war, electricity will be unreliable and so electric cars won't drive.

We discussed flow restrictions on showerheads last week, but I think the conservative view here sees electric car (mandates) coming from the same voices that brought us water-saving showerheads, and expect similar results. Sure, there might be some modest improvement in residential water usage (which is pretty immaterial outside of California, Nevada, and Arizona), but it comes at a cost those writing regulations refuse to admit, and so there is an expectation that we'll all be stuck with terrible cars "for the environment".

See also being forced to ride the bus ("take mass transit!"), or use CFLs back when they had terrible spectra. The conservative view here fears being forced to take quality of life hits "for the greater good" by someone who has drastically different values defining quality of life. On the other hand, I think (good) LED lightbulbs have proven themselves better than incandescent in almost every way short of an Easy-Bake oven, so it isn't always a miss.

The reason electric cars exist, except for Tesla, is due to a mandate to destroy normal cars forever.

Accepting the car means accepting the mandate’s legitimacy. It’s that simple.

Why is Tesla the exception?

Tesla was the first manufacturer to make a non-concept level electric car that was actually better and desirable instead "like regular car but shittier because it's electric".

This doesn't answer the question of what makes it less shitty than the other electric cars. Or is this just about how things were 10-15 years ago?

Does this mandate also exist in China, where EVs make up about half of new car sales?

When you asked this question, did you expect the answer to be "no"? I had my own suspicions, but I spent about 20 seconds googling.

A looming crisis is brewing in China, as hundreds of thousands of unsold, polluting gas-powered vehicles may be rendered unsellable due to incoming emissions rules. The new Chinese emissions rules were announced all the way back in 2016 and are set to go into effect in July.

China plans to phase out conventional gas-burning cars by 2035. This second one is older, so I don't know if they pulled a California since it was published. Apparently individual Chinese provinces are moving faster to ban ICE. They're also subsidized by the state.

In America learning to drive a car is a rather formative experience, and they're crucial for mobility in rural areas. How should we expect rednecks (and those sympathetic towards them!) to react when Washington D.C. or California start fucking with them, their availability, the specs they're allowed to have?

@SubstantialFrivolity

For the record, I strongly oppose a ban on ICE vehicles. Let the market decide if they stay or go. An EV happens to make sense for my wife and me, but I will never ever be ok with mandates.

But since you know the mandates exist, why are you baffled people opposed the project? Shouldn't it make perfect sense to you?

Pollution restrictions are not per se a ban on gas cars. If restricting exactly how many noxious fumes cars may emit counts as "fucking with the specs" then that war was lost in the 70s with the clean air act. Nevertheless, gas cars have prospered since the seventies. I don't think it's reasonable to expect zero restrictions on what are textbook externalities, no matter how great the private benefits of cars are.

The ICE-only phaseout is more like what I was thinking of, so thanks for the link. Although I personally like hybrids a lot, I can understand people being upset about it.

Hybrids are also a straightforwardly superior technology to pure-play ICE for pretty much every use case except long-haul freeway driving. They're not backyard-maintainable, but nor are modern ICEs. (And the backyard-maintainable ICEs of the late C20 were so polluting that in a world where alternatives exist, they really shouldn't be allowed in cities or suburbs).

I still miss those illegal German diesel engines that cheated the emissions tests though. Performance competitive with petrol, and you could get from London to well past Edinburgh on one tank of diesel.

They're not backyard-maintainable, but nor are modern ICEs.

My sense is that the Toyota Dynamic Force engines are still mostly backyard-maintainable (there will always be a question of level of effort as well as some specific sub-systems), and they're pretty darn efficient. Seems they got there with just good old fashioned design optimization and only a couple additional computer-controlled subsystems.

Noah Smith has written about this. Basically, instead of looking at global warming as an engineering problem to be solved, the environmentalist left took it on as a moral crusade, and as a justification for left-wing policies in general.

Then due to negative polarisation, right-wingers moved to opposing it (owning the libs, basically).

Probably the best way to get your dad to buy an electric car would be to talk about how based Elon Musk (and therefore Tesla) is.

I’ve said before that Trump can single-handedly ruin nuclear power for decades, not by opposing it, but by convincing Democrats that those Greens are useful allies.

Toxoplasma is real.

Why is LGBTQ so important for liberals in terms of foreign policy?

Good question.

To steelman it in proper hardcore IR realist style, it is about (Blue)American Empire acquiring permanent class of supporters, collaborators and fifth columnists world wide.

What were German minorities for Third Reich, what were Communist sympathizers for Soviet Union, LGBTQ+ are for Global Rule Based Order. And unlike these, they are permanent presence. You can get rid of ethnic minority, you can get rid even of ideological/religious minority if you are willing to get dirty, but LGBTQ+ are born every day. Even most hard core regimes would balk at gulaging/executing 5% of population in every generation, for forever.

Yes, this sucks if you are LGBTQ+ (or suspected to be one) in unfriendly territory, but it rocks if you are GAE.

How do you distinguish that from the other traditional geopolitical role for minority groups? “No, really, we swear the Ukrainian government is full of Nazis; let us invade already!” It serves Russia’s interests to insist that the U.S. is grooming an LGBT fifth column whether or not that’s true.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think our governments actually run on Bismarckpilled IR theory. Technology crowded out most of the traditional diplomatic options, so we had to come up with ones that wouldn’t cause a land war in Asia. One of those was loudly complaining whenever anyone (other than us) engaged in political repression. Russian law on LGBT advocacy looks pretty bad on that front, so our newspapers make a point of complaining.

Let's call it multivariate.

I think @ThisIsSin is correct downthread when he points out (perhaps I'm editorializing) that a lot of it has to do with cultivating legitimacy. Our national myths are the Civil Rights Movement (protecting the 'oppressed' from the 'privileged') and taking down Nazi Germany because they were killing minorities, whether that had anything to do with our motives at the time or not.

Ergo, to legitimize ongoing and novel interventionism, it helps to slot the matter into such a frame. People are familiar with the concept and trained from birth to see it as morally correct.

It's more a symptom of legitimacy than it is a cultivation thereof.

Accepting American framings on problems means you accept American religion (the foundations of which are "man bad", "white bad", and "straight bad"- 3 Goddesses from the Western perspective named "Safety", "Equality", and "Consent" respectively- and foreign cultures worship them to their detriment) means you accept the power of the priests of those American goddesses to dictate to you what your culture should be.

Pride parades are a symbol of power in the same way military parades are for other nations.

There are specific laws in place that prosecute "propaganda" of "LGBT" with the definitions of those terms being quite vague. Even if a conviction is not reached, as many mottizens have noticed, the process is the punishment. Especially when the process in question is the Russian jail (can't say anything about Middle East, but they're probably not very respectful and luxurious either).

Your flippant "they just don't want parades" comment shows either a lack of basic research, or more likely given your tenure in the community, deliberate downplaying.

I think more about Eastern (typically Asian countries that are too far north or east to be Muslim) cultures when I see this- they have a working system, but American progressives (and the progressives of old, now called traditionalists) don't know how it works/it doesn't play to their biases so they simply see an enemy to be destroyed.

Globohomo (and I mean that in both senses of the word) is just as much born of arrogance as Middle Eastern sexuality laws are.

There has been very limited attempts by American progressives to attack Japanese culture. There were coerced changes to Japanese culture immediately after WW2, but they were bipartisan (MacArthur was profoundly not a progressive - he would be fired by a Dem president for being based in an insubordinate way and would have been McCarthy's running mate if McCarthy had managed to run for president).

But since the end of the US occupation, the only attempt by US progressives to shame Japan for insufficient progressivism was when right-wing Japanese politicians started publicly paying respect to the memory of various controversial WW2-era Japanese leaders.

Despite having been consistently aware of the current thing since the 1990's, I don't know anything about the LGBXYZSNORE situation in Japan without looking it up, indicating that it has not been the current thing in my lifetime.

Interesting question - is this an unprincipled exception or is it just a case of Japanese internal affairs not being on the radar?

I suspect most internal affairs aren't actually on the radar.

Every now and then an issue bubbles up to the level of perception among the voter base. Some fraction of those make it through the social and political filters until "Something Has To Be Done." Then we might or might not spend diplomatic capital on doing that Something.

The temperature is lower for stable, allied nations like Japan. It's higher for suspected rivals. We have a long history of critiquing combloc countries for their freedom of expression, so it doesn't take much to get a Senator or newspaper bemoaning Russia's treatment of their dissidents--including anyone who uses a rainbow flag.

Allegations of American progressives trying and succeeding in pushing progressive/leftist policies in other developed countries are mostly unfounded. Firstly, a lot of the intellectual origins of modern progressivism emerged in Europe, and secondly most European activists who embrace US style racial progressivism do so proactively and because to Europeans (despite a performative disdain for supposed American boorishness) America is more dynamic, more advanced, more exciting, more ‘of the future’ than Europe is (even for those on the left), and everything associated with Americanness, including leftist American gender politics and so on, is cool and interesting and should be adopted by the French / Spanish / German left.

The British / German / Spanish leftists protesting for BLM in 2020 weren’t doing it on orders from the American left, they were doing it proactively because they wanted to.

Agreed as regards Western Europe - we have our own liberal and leftist political traditions which don't grok American progressivism and which American progressives grok even less. We also have our own idiotarian left tradition which has unthinkingly imported American progressivism without applying it to local conditions - but this has a lot less pull than people insist it does, and essentially none at all in France. But American progressives have tried to shame countries for insufficient progressivism - it just doesn't work.

When I pointed out the lack of US progressive bullying of Japan over insufficient progressivism (and there are obvious targets re. the role of women, immigration, outcaste treatment of barakumin) I realise I was implicitly comparing it to the bullying of mostly third-world countries over feminism, LGBFAGMORON, etc.

LGBFAGMORON

Okay, the "XYZSNORE" was one thing, but really?

This isn’t even a top ten free speech issue in a Russian context, though.

I remember reading a report on human rights in Morocco by some organization or other. Obviously, Islamic monarchies generally aren’t up to western snuff. But the report generally glossed over free speech and police corruption(both serious issues) to discuss how barbaric it was that homosexuality was illegal. The attitude towards Russia seems similar- we know it’s a thuggish dictatorship, why are gay rights the top issue over there? The suspicious number of dissidents falling out of windows seems far more serious. The hate speech laws have actual teeth, unlike in much of Europe, and Putin allows the chechens to punish islamophobes.

But the report generally glossed over free speech and police corruption(both serious issues) to discuss how barbaric it was that homosexuality was illegal. The attitude towards Russia seems similar- we know it’s a thuggish dictatorship, why are gay rights the top issue over there?

Because police corruption and suppression of anti-regime speech have motivations that are, if not particularly good, quite understandable to a rational person. A regime wants to keep political power and protect itself against threats almost by definition. A somewhat primitive authoritarian regime clings to power in the only way it knows how to, by throwing dissidents out of windows, duh, more news at 11. Not great all around, but very expected, and they probably won't stop even if the West tells them to – because keeping political power is their primary concern, more so than appeasing external forces.

In contrast, the laws against homosexuality seem like an exercise in pointless sadism for the sake of it. Despite what the original comment implied, countries like Russia don't just practice "don't ask, don't tell", outlawing parades and drag queen story hours at the local kindergarten. It's more like "don't ask, don't tell, don't host or participate in community events (police raids on LGBT parties at night clubs and even on private property have become the norm in Russia), don't run a private business that caters to LGBT customers (a Moscow businessman whose travel agency allegedly specialized in cruises for gay men was recently murder-suicided in jail), don't look like a fag walking down the street to a bored cop, etc". And, at least in the case of Eastern Europe, opposition to homosexuality is a top-down movement rather than a genuinely grassroots one – in the 1990s and 2000s regular Russians watched t.A.T.u girls kiss on live TV, performing alongside flagrantly gay male celebrities like Boris Moiseev and Sergey Zverev, and thought nothing of it. A Ukrainian crossdresser was one of the most popular music artists in the country for a long, long time.

Oppressing LGBT is all very based and trad if we ask the usual suspects (also Not Happening, but is a Good Thing), but serves close to no purpose in upholding these regimes, which is why it's so bizarre that they bother doing it. Coming down hard on those who swing at the king and miss is understandable, somewhat rational and also high-priority for those regimes for maintaining power, but proactively ostracizing and punishing a random group of citizens living their private lives is neither of those things, and demonstratively refusing to stop doing it in when asked nicely speaks of the barbaric nature of their elites, who seemingly delight in engaging in oppression for its own sake. There's a stark contrast with other authoritarian places like China – while the CCP isn't particularly LGBT-friendly either, but its approach is purely technocratic and doesn't demonstrate the same penchant for sadism, which is at least partly why China rarely gets singled out on this matter, at least compared to Russia.

For a regime which is an Islamic monarchy, criminalization of homosexuality- even if only enforced on the poor and unlucky- is quite understandable.

we know it’s a thuggish dictatorship, why are gay rights the top issue over there?

I would like you to quote specific people who claim that gay rights is the top issue in Russia if you want that claim to be defended.

But to propose an answer that sounds plausible to me: the crowd who engages in active dissident politics is not large, and the wiser people are aware that blessed glorious West also has corruption, and perhaps will always have it. There is thus not much demand for being loud in a Putin-bothering way about it. Once Navalny got chased out and later offed, the anti-dictatorship side of dissident Russians has become much more disunited and self-eating.

As for islamic awareness, those of middle class means and above can largely avoid the worst of the Islamic component of Russia. Again, little demand. A lot of anti-Islamism is channeled through the gay rights issues, anyway.

About 5 years ago I was hiking in the Grand Canyon with friends and we met a 20-year-old Russian kid at the beach who asked if he could tag along with us for the hike back up to the rim. He spent a lot of the time telling us how great Russia was, which was fine, but one of the things he pointed to in evidence of its greatness was the fact that they could "beat faggots in the street" with no repercussions. I don't know if this kind of attitude is typical, but the fact that any random tourist would find it appropriate to tell Americans he just met that apropos of nothing in particular is at least an indication that the attitudes over there go beyond simply not celebrating it. Hell, even the rural Trump supporter in our group seemed pretty unnerved by it.

The untranslated word in his mind was almost certainly “pidoraz.” He was picturing child molestors where you pictured consenting homosexuals.

Пидорас (not пидораз), and indeed педерастия, is not "pederast"/"pederasty". The primary meaning is homosexuality and pederasty is the less common meaning. See also lurkmore which, after a quick skim, doesn't even seem to mention the second meaning, if you don't like gramota.ru.

Thanks for the corrections.

This word colloqually means simply homosexual, with the non-mangled "pederast" out of use by anyone but historians.

There are other context clues that suggest the man was most likely speaking about homosexuals. Speaking of "beating faggots on the streets" as a particular boon of Russia suggests you can't do so in other places, which is true for open homosexuals and quite untrue for open child molesters. Furthermore, it is a lot easier to find [alleged] homosexuals on the street for the purposes of beating up, since everyone knows those damn faggots wear long dyed hair and tight jeans, or something to that effect. Pedophiles generally don't advertise themselves so, and if you were going by stereotypes you'd have to face down, like, a quarter of middle-aged male population.

Those who want to beat up pedos on the street generally need some sophisticated preparation, such as setting up a honeypot, perhaps take pointers from Tesak. Note his quote: "Are you a pidoras or a pedofil?"

Today I learned. Thanks for the correction.

He spent a lot of the time telling us how great Russia was, which was fine, but one of the things he pointed to in evidence of its greatness was the fact that they could "beat faggots in the street" with no repercussions. I don't know if this kind of attitude is typical, but the fact that any random tourist would find it appropriate to tell Americans he just met that apropos of nothing in particular is at least an indication that the attitudes over there go beyond simply not celebrating it. Hell, even the rural Trump supporter in our group seemed pretty unnerved by it.

Well yeah, that’s an urban attitude. In America you’re more likely to find it in black ghettos than on a farm.

To the degree that it is likely to be found on a farm, that's because the people working there are latinos.

Sure, you might find it among hired laborers who commute in from a nearby trailer park. Honestly a lot of 'based' Russian social attitudes seem like they're copied from the attitudes of people living in... less-affluent settlements. This isn't a great match for the American right, which is driven by rural and religious attitudes, not shitty neighborhoods.

Last time I checked, the country in Russia was notoriously destitute aside from, as mentioned by others, dachas and cottagecore influencers. Not much trailer culture, either.

which is driven by rural and religious attitudes, not shitty neighborhoods.

This is a distinction without a difference. Rural areas that are not subsidised by commuters/retirees who make money in the city and spend it in the country are poor, have crap amenities other than access to nature because of the high cost of proving them in remote areas, and preferentially retain dumber people. The first two of these points have been true for a long time (since before 1900 in the UK, probably around 1950 in the USA), the third since time immemorial (idiot and pagan are derived from Greek and Latin slurs for country bumpkins respectively).

America has a sufficient number of decent if not particularly nice rural areas that this is not, in fact, a distinction without a difference, and homesteading laws have also tended to spread the rural population a bit more thinly than in other places; there are fewer agglomerations of extreme poverty in rural areas. And it’s the slums which I was referring to, not the rural lower incomes itself.

It's hard to say exactly what the percentage of Russians eager to beat up faggots in the street is. I'd assume it is mostly concentrated in the rural/small town chavs, with the older generations of the same class not as eager to do it themselves, but approving it otherwise.

Tangentially, in USA it seems that the prime thing a regular man fears about prison is ass-rape. In Russia, everybody knows that ass-rape in prisons is reserved for the underclass, such as faggots.

But yes, it really does show that American conservative "don't rub it in our faces" and Russian conservative "don't rub it in our faces" are vastly different levels of tolerance.

I'd assume it is mostly concentrated in the rural/small town chavs

I would associate it, quite strongly, with high crime low income neighborhoods. Eg black ghettos, certain trailer parks. Ditto the use of 'fag'. On the other hand I'd associate 'it should be a crime' 'they're mentally ill' 'its like pedophilia- just unnatural' with the normal American reservoirs of social conservatism- religious and deep rural people.

Tangentially, in USA it seems that the prime thing a regular man fears about prison is ass-rape. In Russia, everybody knows that ass-rape in prisons is reserved for the underclass, such as faggots.

My understanding is that being gay on the outside was merely one of many ways you could become a petukh in Russian prisons. Online accounts agree that the local vor could declare any inmate to be a petukh based on broadly subjective grounds like "not defending his honour" or "behaving dishonorably towards another inmate" and that once you were raped once your status as a petukh was unambiguous across the whole prison system.

Why is LGBTQ so important for liberals in terms of foreign policy?

Why was "society must permit Christian missionary activity" a condition for 18th-19th century European nations when negotiating trade settlements, even though those things had nothing to do with trade?

Notably, euro powers were often flexible about this.

For example, when debating Russia, arguments often amount to Russia is evil because they aren't onboard with pride.

It is one fairly reliable way to judge how ideologically distant a society is from the Western enlightenment tradition. Liberals may not put it in those terms but that's what they actually want.

It seems like existence of pride parades seems to be a key benchmark for judging the moral virtue of a country. Why is this benchmark so central?

It has its limits. Israel has pride parades while Gaza does not and we know what liberals think about this conflict. "Victim of colonialism" is an even more important moral virtue, apparently.

I think you're using the term liberal to talk about two separate groups of people who subscribe to distinct ethical models. The first type judge other societies based on how well they align with tolerant western ideals, as you said, while most of the type of people who simp for Palestine (lets call them progressives) determine the worth of a society based on where they fit in the progressive stack, where being Muslim or black outranks everything else. That Russia is bad because of their lack of civil liberties is a perception held primarily by the first group, not the second, for whom I'd go so far as to say gay rights/women's rights aren't a particularly salient issue outside of their immediate environment. I think if any of them have a negative opinion of Russia, it's likely going to have more to do with associating Russia with Donald Trump than anything lgbt related.

"Victim of colonialism" is an even more important moral virtue, apparently.

Don't think this is quite it. The criterion seems to be more along the lines of "dysfunctional and not white" though I can't put my finger on it exactly. Ethiopia e.g. would get plenty of play despite no colonization, whereas a functional post-colonial country (especially with lots of Hajnal-descended people in it) would be broadly ignored regardless of the magnitude of past abuses.

Again, they aren't mass-executing LGBTQ people or having concentrations camps, they simply don't celebrate it or want it rubbed in people's faces.

Isn't this flatly untrue though? People are imprisoned for homosexuality for many years in many middle eastern countries (Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Dubai, UAE), and executed or whipped in Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia and a few other Muslim countries have a death penalty law on their books for homosexuality, sure, but AFAIK they don’t actually execute people for it except in Iran.

This hasn't been that widespread. We are told 5% of the population belong to these minorities yet there aren't 4 million gay prisoners in Iran. The handfull who end up in prison seem to either be agitators, pedofiles or people who are doing their best to provoke the system.

If the only ones imprisoned are agitators, shouldn't we have examples of Iranian men who are undeniably fucking other men, yet weren't imprisoned for it?

Well, I guess this place is called the Motte for a reason! What a massive change of tack. If we accept that the middle east is actually secretly tolerant of homosexuality, but uses its anti-gay laws merely as an instrument of authoritarian rule to arrest agitators, well okay then. But that still sounds just as much like something a liberal should oppose (regardless whether or not the country in question has pride parades).

But that still sounds just as much like something a liberal should oppose

Yes, but now the difference between liberals (who is not fine with using anti-X laws merely as an instrument of authoritarian rule to arrest agitators) and progressives (who do this constantly, that's why they really like anti-X laws) becomes extremely important.

Microsoft can't just stop being an absolute PITA.

I recently read the news online that they were graciously doling out access to OpenAI's o3 mini high model (don't ask) through their own Copilot app, even for free users.

I install said app, and log in with a burner account. No option to use a reasoning model in sight. I didn't bother using the different Bing app, which also has Copilot integrated.

I switch to my NHS account, managed by Microsoft, and it kicks me off to the Microsoft 365 app, where there isn't even a visible option to use Copilot that I can see.

I finally open Copilot on the web, login with my burner, and tada, the option is right there.

You'd think they'd have learned to manage the absolute bare minimum in feature consistency and nomenclature by now.

While we're complaining about software, Mozilla made the most absurdly bad change to Firefox's UI a week or so ago.

They started hiding the https:// in the address bar until you click on it...then everything jumps half an inch to the right so the part of the URL you selected isn't under your mouse anymore. I have a recommendation for those designers.

Huh, my Mozilla address bar still displays 'https://' in the beginning, and I updated Mozilla a few days ago. Maybe I have specified some setting long ago.

here is its announcement for Nightly:

  • HTTP As the Exception: For a more secure web experience, we'll now display the HTTP protocol prominently, so you know when you're on a non-secure site, while HTTPS will be hidden to reduce clutter.

You can disable it with about:preferences -> browser.urlbar.trimURLs = false

Chrome also has an annoying habit of hiding the exact url of a link I copied, until I press a button to reveal it. Like dawg, I get that you cater to the LCD, but I can handle that.

How's The Motte feel about the coming US recession everyone is assuring me will start this year?

Yes, I know the internet has predicted 25 of the last 1 recessions, and if I search youtube I'll find videos of indicators that have never been wrong predicting a recession within the next six months for the past six years, but it feels like the volume is starting to heat up.

Anyone else getting this or is it just my own personal algonoise? Are we feeling bearish? Should I start stacking cash?

I've been holding onto a few hundred k in cash at 5ish%, feeling very stupid for the past year as everyone's gainz blow past. We're only down 8% from peak right now, vs the 25% crash in 2022.

Praying for a huge nosedive.

Something might still pull us out of negative GDP territory and avoid a recession, formally defined, but I definitely don't expect great stock returns this year. Even if Trump doesn't fully implement ruinous economic policies, the constant waffling and threats are going to scare the hoes.

Something I have no idea how to gauge is whether the layoffs will themselves have a substantial economic effect. Seeing all those houses for sale around DC was kind of shocking but perhaps only matters locally.

Are the death penalty (and penal theories broadly) not downstream from how we feel about others? Such that it’s about feelings, and not “theory”?

  • I can imagine a criminal to whom I have no social feelings; if the crime is bad, I would like him punished severely, even to the point of death. This is because the absence of administering the punishment is evolutionarily painful to me. Humans evolved to want to punish wrongdoers.

  • I can, for brief moments, imagine myself being such a loving Amish fella that I genuinely love every human as if they were an adorable puppy or priceless artifact. And I see their sins almost like “mistake theory”. If this is a person’s abiding belief, and he believes in an afterlife, then I can imagine the evolutionary need for revenge simply turning off, entirely.

Is there necessarily more to it than this? Those who opposite the death penalty probably don’t have an abiding feeling of vengeance. Those who support it would probably feel better knowing crime is taken care of (a sense of balance being restored).

If I were the victim of a terrible crime, I would accept the criminal as 'effectively dead' if they were imprisoned for life without parole but if I was given the option to put them to death, I would do so since it's probably better for society.

Life without parole is extremely rare though, and death row prisoners constantly drag victims back into court over and over again with legal bullshit.

An evolutionary need for revenge is a misalignment in the same way a foot fetish is. Evolution just wants you to maximize your offspring. If you live in a world filled with positive-sum opportunities and mistake-theorist competition, then evolution wants you to sing kumbaya and grow the economy together so that there's more resources for your many children to use on their many children. If you live in a zero-sum world dominated by conflict theorists, evolution wants you to waste as few resources as possible in swiftly eliminating the competition. Neither really leaves room for using up resources on vengeance, especially if seeking vengeance puts you at risk at all. If anything, the extra costs associated with seeking revenge are a punishment on you for not eliminating the competition before they could do whatever they did that makes you want to seek revenge.

Our instincts evolved in a different environment, one where revenge and harming defectors were conducive to genetic fitness, hence the instinct for revenge and/or harming defectors never went away. Children show this instinct. The variables of today aren’t the variables of our prehistoric environment. If you didn’t retaliate when a tribe member harmed the group, the group as a whole perishes, and those genes are lost. If you don’t retaliate when an enemy attacks your tribe, either the enemy takes your mates or your own tribal group disposes you. Hence the genes.

So the feeling of dissatisfaction from an inability to retaliate will stick around unless you’ve somehow developed a sense of superseding brotherly love in an abundant positive sum environment where the harm is trivial and low stacks (because heaven), or something like that. Importantly, this feeling can be hellish because it’s your deepest biology signaling that your very genetic fitness is at stake — not much different than if your very life were at stake, because genetically it is.

Revenge is a product of simple iterated game theory. Humans not being solitary also adds up to this. Can't survive alone -> can't just kill all competition -> intra-tribe squabbles are nonlethal -> being known as a spiteful person becomes valuable.

I'm vaguely in favor of the death penalty, but not so much as a penalty.

It just seems that some humans are irredeemable and mentally broken enough that it seems like the only thing to do is to just remove them entirely.

If you had a tied up evil person (Hitler, Mao, Stalin, etc take your pick) and a gun in hand, what would you do?

For the punishment minded maybe they shoot the person in the gut and let him die a slow death over a week. I'd generally just shoot them in the head and be done with it.

If someone has personally wronged me I become all in favor of punishment. Maybe that makes me a hypocrite, but I feel that the emotional response is not a good guide for society wide policy.

I'd say so.

Almost, anyway. Opponents have a weaker desire for vengeance such that it's subordinate to other desires. Like "I would like to be generous in my victory" or "I should live according to these religious principles" or even "I don't want blood on my hands."

But evopsych isn't enough to explain it. The desire for vengeance is competing with other adaptive behaviors. At the extreme end, maybe it drives someone to kill a criminal even though it costs him his own life. That's not any more sound, in an evolutionary sense, than forgiving every sin.

Do you think that Europe is able to rearm itself? So far the track record of Brussels is abysmal when it comes to show something for big projects. So my bet is on nothing will happen.

I'm more optimistic about country or bloc-level rearming (i.e. something like the Nordics + Baltics + Poland) then I am about it happening at the EU level. I'm no expert but I'd imagine the political incentives are too diverse between the member states for there to be any sort of unified approach. I'd be surprised if Spain or Italy want to make the same sacrifices as Estonia or Finland when they're at approximately zero risk of invasion. It's also unclear whether countries that are prepared to spend the necessary resources want to contribute them to what might start looking more like Macron's Neo-French empire than a military union equally committed to everyone's interests. We'll have to see.

In terms of production, likely yes. That's the least concerning part IMO.

Politics is a much bigger question. The possible internal instability, as well as the ability to withstand external attacks of political or hybrid nature. Second to that, manpower issues, and the societal implications of the possible solutions for those. After that, I'd say various enablers (satellites etc) which Europe depends on the US for.

By repurposing existing factories (the Germans are looking at converting a lot of major factories VW and other auto manufacturers don’t need anymore) and building new ones they can scale up production pretty fast. The issue is whether you just want a more powerful NATO-integrated army or one actually capable of operating on its own. As I understand it there are many functions like satellites and communications, air to air refueling etc where they’re fully reliant on the US.

Warfronts released a pretty good video summarizing the current NATO military asset situation.
TL;DR: NATO/Europe is actually fine in most respects and even significantly outnumbers Russia in terms of navy. The critical bottleneck are artillery shells. Artillery is responsible for ~70-80% of casualties in the current war for Ukraine, to give you an idea of its importance.
There are multiple factories currently in construction but it'll be years before they're ready and producing in the necessary numbers.

Artillery is responsible for ~70-80% of casualties in the current war for Ukraine, to give you an idea of its importance.

True in terms of running totals since the beginning of the war, but as of now both sides are claiming 50%+ of casualties going forward are from drones.

Certain European countries might, but I seriously doubt “Europe” will arm “itself” anytime soon. Without overwhelming American power to bind the continent it’s clear that European countries have wildly different interests. Besides the threat isn’t really that serious as modern Russia isn’t a particularly strong or aggressive country. Besides European countries already spend quite a bit on defense. The main bottleneck is a lack of fighting spirit and social cohesion.

I would agree that Russia is less powerful than sometimes believed, but claiming it’s not particularly aggressive is quite a take.

Soviet Union was a military behemoth that expressed constant interest in taking over Europe and Asia as well as projecting power into Africa and Latin America. A very substantial chunk of western intellectual classes and almost entirety of the new world third world leaders were sympathetic to its ideology to some degree. It was ruled by people who were capable of sanctioning deaths on the order of tens of millions and had almost total political control of their population.

NATO existed to defend the remaining tiny stretch of capitalist Europe against this.

In comparison what’s Russia? A rump state that staged a couple half failed interventions in its generally pretty messed up barely seceded neighbours, and spent the last 3 decades trying to integrate with neoliberal global markets.

England, Italy, France, Germany or even Turkey feels no serious threat from modern Russia. Therefore the “alliance” just lingers on as a braindead useless entity.

So, where is Zorba?

Is he really busy with work? Life in general? Doesn't like the opinions of the most prolific posters these days? The site still loads every time, so I'm assuming he's around doing something. There's months between bits of activity, and the last comment was on election night.

Zorba I miss you.

Is he really busy with work? Life in general?

Pretty much, yeah.

(ping @TitaniumButterfly @Southkraut)

So, here, lemme give a sort of tl;dr of The Shape Of Zorba's Life.

I vaguely divide most of my tasks into a few categories. In no particular order, those are:

  • Sanity
  • Family
  • Survival
  • Professional hobby
  • Unprofessional hobby

The tricky part is that I usually have time for at most four of them. Unsurprisingly, Sanity, Family, and Survival end up in those four. They're kinda important.

In my case, I work in the game industry. So "professional hobby" is making my own game studio. "Unprofessional hobby" is The Motte. I end up having to choose between them, and for a while, I was aiming most of that spare time at The Motte in the hopes I could make it start paying for itself; if The Motte could take over Survival (which more-or-less gets summarized as Money, usually in the form of Day Job) then suddenly "I have time for four of them" starts looking pretty good.

Well, I'm not going to say that outcome is impossible, but at the moment, it seems pretty unlikely. I took a serious shot, it did not immediately work out. This meant I had the long-term choice of sacrificing professional-hobby in favor of unprofessional-hobby, or vice-versa.

That whole "can I make The Motte take over Survival" thing also applies to the game studio, though. And I found myself in a situation where I had some really promising ideas and tools, which made it seem like I had a plausible shot at making Professional Hobby actually become my day job, thus subsuming Survival entirely, if I started working for myself and managed to get something viable before I ran out of savings.

And so that's what I'm fundamentally focusing on. If I can collapse Professional Hobby and Survival into one thing, then I have spare time to keep working on Motte stuff. But I just can't afford to get too distracted from this, because the bank account isn't going to last forever.

So the tl;dr is that I ended up needing to triage and The Motte got the short end of the stick. That doesn't mean it's abandoned - I really do want to work on it - that just means that there's enough stuff I have more immediate needs for that it has to be sidelined for now.

I will say that the mods have done a great job of keeping this place going. Its current survival is entirely thanks to them and I am extremely grateful. Fingers crossed that my current project is successful - in fact I'm looking at a major milestone coming up in a week that'll give me a much better sense of whether this is viable - and if it is, then I'll be able to come back to The Motte and put some serious effort into long-term plans that I simply never managed to work on.

Until then . . . keep it up, y'all.

Best of luck with the project!

Let us know what it's about, once you've got a sliver of dry land beneath you and a moment to spare.

Absolutely! I'm hoping to get a somewhat-serious public release in the next few months.

Cheers!

We have a Tinker Tuesday Thread if you ever want to share progress.

I should definitely do that - I actually started a #workshop thread on a Discord for much the same reason, though unfortunately a lot of stuff that I'm doing is backend and hard to share in interesting ways. But I'll see if I can start posting there when I do have things of interest :)

I'm on a server with him so pinged him for you, but in general yeah I think the guy is just incredibly busy and tbh I'm amazed and a bit humbled at how much love he still has to keep this site afloat.

Awesome, thank you.

Hail Mary ping: @ZorbaTHut

So, what are you reading?

My backlog isn't budging much. Adding Ender's Shadow to the pile.

I just finished Jilly Cooper's Rivals, I'm going to do a big write up of it after I rewatch the Hulu series that just got made out of it. Absolutely fantastic worldbuilding and a book with a lot more depth than you'd think.

I'm going to start Fewer Rules Better People, which is practically speaking a pamphlet. I'm thinking of bulk buying copies and highlighting them and giving them to my local politicians for Christmas.

I'm still slugging through Seeing Like a State, I'm finally through all that boring shit about farming and gotten to his concept of Metis.

On Audible I finished up Iron Kingdom, which was so boring but I wanted to finish it. Just started Clavell's Noble House, which I was hoping would be good like Shogun and King Rat, but so far seems closer to its direct prequel TaiPan, which I found mid. Clavell just seems to handle the Japs better than the Chinks.

I just discovered and have been binging "The Years of Apocalypse" on Royal Road. Probably the most succinct summary I can give is: "It's almost Mother of Learning." Less rational, less super deep in depth worldbuilding, less comedy, less overarching grand mystery time loop shenanigans. But only very slightly less. Second best time loop story I've ever read, it's fantastic.

Another (finished!) Royal Road story you might want to scratch your Mother of Learning itch with is "The Perfect Run". YMMV, especially if you don't like superhero stuff, but I thought it was quite good.

Perfect Run is too much of a comedy and is too "wacky" for me. Where as both MoL and YoA are overall pretty serious.

I read a few dozen chapters back when it was coming out. It was okay, but I didn't care for it a ton. It's on my list of stories I might go back and finish some day, but probably won't actually get around to.

I finished the two novels I started in Feb a couple weeks ago.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

I picked this up digitally after seeing @SubstantialFrivolity 's review. I largely agree with what he wrote but have some additional observations:

A society with a dearth of women is an interesting concept. Historically, what it's led to is almost exclusively heavily utilized prostitution (this is fresh on my mind, given that I just read about the American West). Heinlein goes the opposite way here and posits that men in a more cultured society would revere and protect women even more than they do so now, that consent would be cherished, and that rape would be considered far worse than murder. Once again, this is a concept close at hand for me, given that I happened to stumble across Lara Logan's horrifying story and have had the concept of rape just.... appear more than normal in various contexts.

I'm less down on the polycule aspect, and I think that the idea of linear marriages is compelling. The archetype of a man trading in his wife for a younger one is widespread for a reason. Frankly, I think many of them would keep the older wife if they could, but ultimately make the choice for sex over love and wisdom. The fact that this sort of familial structure simply doesn't exist even with widespread acceptance of polyamory means probably nobody else finds it appealing, though.

The Lunar pidgin dialect that the book is written in made it read "fast" for me. It was very businesslike and to the point, with very few extraneous details. Sometimes this felt more like a textbook on how a revolution is run instead of a story because of this pacing.

My primary criticism is perhaps twofold: The character of Wyoh is introduced and essentially disappears for the back 2/3 of the novel, and the computer as a character is more of a deus ex machina than anything else. Speaking of the latter, it is truly hilarious how much Heinlein undershot computing power estimates in many ways.

Conversations with Friends

After having such a great time reading "Normal People" I decided to dig into this one. In short, a disappointment.

Compared to the first of Sally's books I read, this one had far more unlikeable characters and dug into more culture war crap than I had hoped. The protagonists are insufferable Irish college students (two of them spoken word poetry phenoms if that gives you any indication of where this is going) and basically details a couple of unrealistic relationships in a group.

I can't help but wonder how much Sally knew these people sucked. I get the impression she's pretty into lame, midrange-for-the-uk political views and just got lucky keeping her opinions to herself in "Normal People".

On the plus side, the protagonist is a 21-year-old girl and is actually as stupid as we all were at that age (making immature and emotional decisions, etc.), so that at least felt realistic. As always, the sex scenes are pretty nice, and the build-up to them is paced well. I don't feel like I wasted my team reading it but there are better books out there for sure.

Next in the Queue is:

  • Cryptonomicon
  • My Brilliant Friend
  • Anathem

Didn’t stick with Conversations with Friends but found Normal People very perceptive and, in many ways, a perfect representation of the experience of many parts of rural and urban Ireland and especially where those two things collide. (I’m Irish.)

I'm glad you can vouch for its "authenticity." I've always known that the romantic rhythms in Ireland are different from those where I grew up, and seeing them represented in a novel is one of the reasons I really liked it.

I just finished Metro 2033. I'd liked the game some time ago, was bereft of things to do (not terribly sick, but just enough to deter me from my usual weekend plan of socializing at the bar) and figured I'd brush back up on it before deciding whether or not to go for purchasing Metro: Exodus because I wasn't really feeling another replay of Far Cry 4, 5, or New Dawn (FC6 was just too bad to play through IMO).

It was a slog for most of it, the (translated into English) prose not entertaining enough in its own right to carry the slow pace before the plot got into gear. The last third of it was good enough to make me consider Metro 2034 and Metro 2035. If nothing else, reading Metro 2034 will be a shorter time investment than replaying the first two games.

For more fun junk food, I recently polished off the latest of Blaine Pardoe's Blue Dawn series. Basically, imagine a Tom Clancy novel set in a contemporary American civil war-like scenario and see also: Kurt Schlicter's People's Republic* series. Both are fun if cheesy, the perfect sort of book to kill a long day of flying with, but IMO Blue Dawn was just a bit better/more compelling even if the editing could've used some work.

Piranesi, by the author of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. It's a very different book from her first - the whole book is entries from the protagonist's journal, and it takes place almost entirely in a weird magic pocket dimension. It's oddly reminiscent of the journals you find in the Myst series, as the journal-keeper has a suspiciously large vocabulary and erudite manner for someone who lives alone in a giant labyrinth with no books, little company, and no memory of ever living anywhere else. (A deliberate choice here - you get hints quite early on that he did in fact once live somewhere else but something has happened to his memory. I will spoil no further, because I highly recommend this book.)

Also featuring a protagonist with memory issues, we have Across the Void, a thriller author's first venture into science fiction. Alas, I cannot recommend it, and therefore will spoil away. We've got the first-ever manned mission to Europa! But oh no Europa's icy waters contain a virus which promptly causes a mini-pandemic among the crew! But the head guy at NASA had a contingency plan for this - kill them all and make it look like a space accident! But the protagonist isn't actively ill anymore, so now we're going to forget all about the virus and focus on getting her back to Earth, while head NASA guy tries to kill her so she won't reveal his crimes. At no point does anyone wonder about the broader implications of alien planets having diseases that can infect humans, nor whether such a virus may have any long-term effects on a human who survives the initial infection.

I loved the Shadow series. Much better than the non-ender books in the original series!

Just finished book 1 of The Villianess is an SS+ Rank Avenurer, and while it's... adequate, I didn't find it compelling enough to want to continue the series.

On the subject of Ender's Shadow, I personally didn't appreciate the liberties it took with the original Ender's Game, and did not continue that the Shadow series either.

Edited for clarity.

I didn’t like Ender’s Shadow very much. That being said, I do think that the Shadow series improved as time went on. The sequels have much more geopolitics and social commentary vs retcons and use Peter and Petra as a protagonist regularly enough to get a break from Bean.

I didn't care for the character of Bean as a protagonist. He just didn't work for me and I didn't connect to him at all. It was a shame because I actually liked the idea of exploring the geopolitical situation on Earth. But rewriting Bean like that, besides the deficiencies in his character, really ret-conned Ender's Game, and not in a good way.

But if you never continued on to Speaker of the Dead, etc., I do recommend giving it a shot. SotD and its followups go in a very different direction from Ender's Game but really introduce some fascinating ideas about contact between alien species, different modes of consciousness, that kind of thing. And they have one of my favorite Christian characters in fiction, FWIW.

I completely agree, for me that book diminished the characters of both Bean and especially Ender, gutted the emotional impact of Ender's journey, and twisted the entire narrative of Ender's Game into a lame-assed Xanatos-style manipulation by proxy. Weak.

When I said that I didn't continue the series, I meant the Shadow series, which I've edited my original post to clarify. I appreciated the different direction that the sequels took, even if I found the ending of Xenocide a little ham-handed and the portrayal of OCD a little stilted and one-dimensional. I have not read Ender in Exile, though I'd be open to checking it out if I had a decent reason to do so.

I completely agree, for me that book diminished the characters of both Bean and especially Ender, gutted the emotional impact of Ender's journey, and twisted the entire narrative of Ender's Game into a lame-assed Xanatos-style manipulation by proxy. Weak.

Doesn't Ender think that the plot of Ender's Game constitutes him being the victim of lame-assed Xanatos-style manipulation by proxy? The setup for the Speaker/Xenocide/Children trilogy is Ender's struggle to atone for/undo the xenocide he was the unwitting tool of.

Good question! I think from Ender's perspective the answer to that question would be a qualified yes. Explanation follows.

I referenced Xanatos with the trope of the Chessmaster in mind, and the main dramatic conflict of the original Ender's Game, ie the fate of the third invasion, just isn't a good fit for that style of character to begin with. It is true, however, that adults and leaders are repeatedly portrayed as a bunch of Manipulative Bastards shamelessly forging Ender into a weapon capable of defeating the buggers formics. This is absolutely a major theme of Ender's Game, as is his awareness and understanding of that even as he resentfully accepts its necessity. The motivation for this, however, is the survival of humanity itself; the formics are, in the parlance of the sequels, varelse for all intents and purposes. It isn't until the Biggest Reveal of the novel that we learn that the formics had come to understand that humans were sentient and that the third invasion was completely unnecessary. So while it was undoubtedly manipulative to frame the actual fleet battles against the formics as a continuation of the original battle school games with Mazer Rackham as an opponent, the third invasion as shown in Ender's Game was always portrayed as a desperate gamble for mere survival rather than a deliberately manipulated outcome and the lameness of the manipulations of the various adults and leaders is only visible in retrospect and was never something that any of the adults in charge could have predicted.

Now I'm going to slag on Ender's Shadow in a little more detail to show more of my overall thinking. One of the major challenges of telling Bean's tale is that the backstory of Ender's Game is a known commodity and so the dramatic tension of the original is absent. Achilles can't hold a candle to the extinction of humanity here. A second challenge to telling Bean's tale is that Bean and Ender share a lot of similarities in their overall character, which I think makes it exceedingly difficult to make Bean's story strong and compelling enough in its own right without diminishing Ender's character arc from the original book. Card fails to thread that particular needle, playing up the stress that Ender is under and portraying him as beginning to break down, thus allowing Bean to covertly ride to the rescue again and again. Bean's aggrandizement starts with drawing up the roster for Ender's Dragon Army and inserting himself into same but progresses to outsmarting the adults of battle school and the many unfair advantages they give the opposing armies. Later, by way of having Ender make more and more mistakes, Bean becomes an ever-better leader, tidying up by issuing his own orders and repeatedly saving the day. By the time that the oldest fleet has arrived at the final Formic homeworld, this angle has been so played up that Ender's initial disbelief at the impossible scenario is retconned into him being unable to come up with a plan and Bean is given the option of commanding the fleet himself, which allows him to formulate a strategy for victory. IMO Card never does a good enough job of showing us why Bean wasn't a superior leader and as a result Bean the character comes off as largely as a smarter version of Ender, who we are nevertheless told struggles to understand what makes Ender the better leader. There just isn't enough of an emotional or dramatic arc there for me. Hence, lame.

IMO Card never does a good enough job of showing us why Bean wasn't a superior leader and as a result Bean the character comes off as largely as a smarter version of Ender, who we are nevertheless told struggles to understand what makes Ender the better leader.

I mean, the answer is pretty simple, to the point of being implied- Bean is an alien(almost literally) who struggles to connect with humans and can't properly motivate or connect with his subordinates. I agree that Card didn't do a good job of showing this, but in backgrounds where leadership is prized(like Card's Mormon subculture) it just kind of comes off as obvious. Ender having an elan of leadership while others don't is a minor theme in Ender's game, so it fits with the way the series sees things.

I totally agree with this. I know I'm nitpicking in that particular complaint! Also, the detail about Mormons prizing leadership is one I hadn't thought about. Thanks!

Ender in Exile is an entertaining read. If you’re just a fan of the setting, or if you really want to bridge Ender’s Game and the sequels, it’s worth reading. But that being said, you can definitely go without it, and it’s thematically more like a shadow series than like either the original novel or it’s sequels.

I liked it. If you didn’t like Shadow of the Hegemon, you might not. It suffers from treating Ender like, well, not a person- it’s not that he doesn’t have flaws, it’s that he’s a vehicle for philosophical exploration and social commentary rather than a believable character. The scenes on the colony world are good, the love story on the ship is… more of a series of monologues.

TLDR, read it if you want to frame the sequels the way Card wanted you to. If you didn’t like the shadow series I’d not expect you to like this for its own sake.

Thanks! I'll keep that in mind if I ever see a cheap copy of it, or if alternately the Kindle version goes on sale.

the liberties it took with the original

I know what you mean. I've read most of this book before, but never managed to get past the last few chapters. Didn't quite seem like the Bean we knew. Still, it has some punch in its writing, and maybe the series is interesting.

The problem is it's not AT ALL the Bean that we see in Ender's Game. You can tell because his personality changes drastically when he has conversations with Ender (since those were already canon). The book tries to excuse it as him "feeling nervous around Ender", but that's incredibly weak. Similarly, the only reason all his manipulations of Ender (and his backseat ro have to be so subtle and behind-the-scenes is to be compatible with the original narrative; there's no good in-universe explanation.

Orson Scott Card just thought up a neat new OC and shoehorned him into the original story, and it shows. And I hate how completely it invalidates Ender's choices. But hey, that new character does come into his own in the sequels, at least, when he's not undermining a previously-written story.

Just finished Theft of Fire, a hard scifi novel about a down on his luck asteroid miner being roped into a heist far above his paygrade. Good stuff, I was frankly surprised by the sheer overlap between both the setting of the story and the author's style and my own. Funnily enough, counting from the date of publication, my work precedes his.

I could critique things like writing a scifi story set a hundred years in the future where the state of the art in AI ignores how good ChatGPT was at the time of publication, but eh.

After barely recovering from the shock of finding out that China Mieville is a man, I've made it about a hundred pages into Perdido Street Station. I'd been meaning to getting around to reading his work eventually, as I've seen strongly positive sentiment. That being said, I'm not super impressed so far, he's one of those literary types who really leans into florid and slightly overwrought prose.

could critique things like writing a scifi story set a hundred years in the future where the state of the art in AI ignores how good ChatGPT was at the time of publication, but eh.

Maybe it's aimed for the rocketpunk audience?

I could critique things like writing a scifi story set a hundred years in the future where the state of the art in AI ignores how good ChatGPT was at the time of publication, but eh.

Are we going to start doing retrofuturism about how cute the predictions were in 2019 now?

Now I want to reread some of Robert J Sawyer's books. He wrote a few "day-after-tomorrow" science fiction stories in the early 21st century, and it would be interesting to see how well they've aged.

Theft of Fire came out at the end of 2023! I can cut anyone from the old, old days of 2019 slack haha.

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