domain:farhakhalidi.substack.com?page=5
Hyperion
16hr ago
but it's certainly been a funny thing to notice given how much critical theory, in practice, is about conveniently eliding between various definitions of words in different contexts to get people to reject or accept certain ideas (e.g. racism, sexism, white supremacy, feminism).
That is also critical theory in practice. It goes back to Hegel's dialectical method and the idea that the philosopher can overcome apparent contradictions through clever arguments and that all of history and reality was about contradictions being made whole again, back to the unity of god. This gets turned into a social theory of resolving all social distinctions like class, sex, race, etc. through clever arguments and revolution.
EdgeCityRed
16hr ago
Spotify researches the playlists that users make and will make similar ones. This is something I've noticed over the years; it's just serving a userbase, because some people won't bother to actually create themed playlists but will search for them. For example, I've made a playlist or two for (NFL) football season, and if I enter "football" it shows me a Spotify-created list called Hype Football Mix. There's a Vampiric Mix (which is actually garbage) because I've favorited some user's playlist to make fanvids for an Anne Rice series. Most of these are probably AI-driven.
KingOfTheBailey
16hr ago
Glad someone mentioned Factorio and Kingdom Come. I think Factorio shows the most likely path out of the mess: non-woke, not anti-woke. Contrast explicitly anti-woke games like Hatred where you just trigger a new wave of thinkpieces that probably hurt your cause more than they help.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
16hr ago
I skimmed it.
You didn't read it and your critiques have no value because you do not understand the position you're attempting to argue against. You're not engaging with the material being presented, and you don't even seem to understand the underlying reasoning. Even beyond that your position is an incomprehensible joke - "Worst case they die out and are thoroughly forgotten. Not a problem for anyone involved in said history." Did you even read your own post? Dying is actually something most people consider to be a problem!
Well you should read it. It goes over, in sometimes tedious detail, about how the present-day environmental movement evolved. It's a pretty infuriating book and it makes very clear environmentalism is actually not about the environment.
Sure, I'm willing to read it - though I probably won't be finished by the time this thread is dead, which is why I gave my reply after reading about the book and not after I'd finished reading it. But John Michael Greer has been making this exact point for decades now! He has written multiple articles explaining why the environmentalist movement has failed, how it failed and what people can do to move on in a world shaped by that failure. He explicitly and overtly attacks a lot of the scams like Goldman Sachs' carbon pricing scheme and even in the essay you refused to read he explicitly points out that the entire environmentalist movement has done absolutely nothing to change the trajectory of carbon emissions.
If you're going to complain about someone being a noise generator, take a look at yourself - you spouted a whole bunch of nonsense because you couldn't even be bothered reading a single essay while expecting me to go read an entire novel.
Hyperion
16hr ago
You don't have to be a cynic to think that. The guy who coined it spells it out for you. All this far-leftist stuff is cynical and power driven, they explain why this is in detail in their writings. The conspiracy is out in the open for everyone to see.
Knowledge production as socially constructed and a means to power. The glorification of revolutionary violence. It's all there in Marx and all the various critical theorists.
Shrike
16hr ago
Yeah – I think all of these are good points. I guess "China" and, I dunno, "global warming" strike me as different sorts of issues, although as you point out they are all intertwined.
I'd love to read those US DoD comments if you can drag up the link. Not challenging it as wrong. Just enjoy reading this kinda stuff.
Oh sure, same here. Not that I mind being challenged :)
Here's an example from September from Voice of America: US Air Force general: Russia military larger, better than before Ukraine invasion
Here's another example in the Hill from March, that I think is a bit more in-depth: US general says Russian army has grown by 15 percent since pre-Ukraine war
Main takeaways:
- Gen. Christopher Cavoli, the head of U.S. European Command, said Thursday that Russia’s army has grown by 15 percent since before the invasion of Ukraine, raising the alarm that Russian forces are reconstituting “far faster” than initial estimates suggested.
- In written statements, Cavoli said Russia has also lost about 10 percent of its air force and more than 2,000 tanks on the battlefield. Moscow has also been beaten back in the Black Sea by Ukraine, but he said the Russian naval activity is at a “worldwide peak.”
- Cavoli said in his written testimony that Russia is expected to produce more ammunition than all 32 NATO allies combined per year and is on track to “command the largest military on the continent and a defense industrial complex capable of generating substantial amounts of ammunition and materiel in support of large scale combat operations.”
(Note that the written testimony is doubtless floating around on a .senate.gov website somewhere, I just haven't bothered to track it down.)
My thoughts, fwiw:
Historically, militaries that are not defeated during a conflict often (maybe even typically) are stronger after the conflict than before. It seems to me that Russia will be much the same, with the largest army in Europe and the most experienced army in the world (with relevant experience defeating frontline NATO technology) after the war in Ukraine is over. I think it's true that a lot of their Soviet inheritance will be spent, but I'm not sure (as per e.g. the statement above) they couldn't stock back up more aggressively than the West – which, likewise, has spent much of its Cold War inheritance.
I also don't think the injuries inflicted on Russia are "minor" – Russia has lost a lot of modern armor, and huge portions of their rotary and fixed-wing aviation. For instance, Russia is estimated to have lost about a quarter (40ish out of 150ish) of its Su-34 strike aircraft. Based on past orders, it probably will take at least two years to reconstitute their forces, assuming no more are lost. But on the flip side, the war spurred innovation, such as the production of much-needed glide bombs, that make the remaining Su-34 fleet much more lethal.
From the American perspective, I continue to believe that the true threat to American hegemony is more likely to be China. But I think Russia continues to be a live player, and its actions in Ukraine, rather than dooming it to irrelevance, seem on balance poised to make it more important and relevant in the future.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
17hr ago
The loudness war refers to dynamic range within a song rather than across songs, so it's not really relevant here. I've never seen e.g. an analysis of range of maximum loudness across all songs in a given year.
Corvos
18hr ago
There is also a bone-headed epistemic arrogance you can get when you never encounter anything unfamiliar. Books more than any other medium cover a wide range of history and geography, and being forced to take those perspectives seriously for a while is probably good for people.
Whether current Humanities degrees do this is debatable.
ThisIsSin
One cannot seek change to a game one cannot adequately describe
18hr ago
Given I bother to bring it up, the answer is, in a word, "no".
Which is itself kind of ironic, considering that the entire reason my username is what is it is, is to remind myself that I have better things to do than to sit here and critically theorize. That said, encountering certain views here (and being "forced" to think about them) has been helpful in other contexts; other than that I simply hope to offer responses that are less wrong than what came before.
If I'm going to be lazy and selfish it might as well be at least a little constructive.
Corvos
18hr ago
I am assuming much lower numbers of reviews. Most people don’t review to start with, and the ones who do are statistically freaks, which is not necessarily promising.
If you assume a non-triple-A game has 20 4-star reviews, then a single 1-star review drops its average from 4 to 3.85. If you’re competing against hundreds of other games that’s potentially the difference between profit and no profit. Like AirBnB. So a legitimate user can make credible threats.
Even on the larger scale, review bombers, like Twitter cancellers, can accumulate easily to destroy something for some perceived wrong or just for money.
Ratios are a valid signal but I don’t think you can use them in isolation.
I'll have to look into it... Actually can you you name the work? "Van Creveld 4th Gen Warfare" doesn't turn up much
He made the list twice with Supplying War, and Fighting Power
TwiceHuman
18hr ago
Does that actually happen, though? It seems like it's just an excuse that companies make when their games fail. Many negative reviews come quickly whenever a company does something people don't like and posts about it go viral.
Anyway, your point is valid, bbut if a million newish accounts with a low amount of money spent just starts reviewing games negatively, that's quite easy to spot. My steam account has spent more than 1000$ on games and is more than 10 years old and it's an active account. You can't fake that. You can even collect stats about how many reviews are made by "certainly legit" accounts, and if one game suddenly has a lower ratio than many other games, where it previously didn't, you know somebody used bots. I made it easy for myself by choosing Steam as an example, but the problem doesn't sound very difficult in general
hydroacetylene
19hr ago
I thought that although Japan is not a Christian country, to say the least, Christmas carols and at least the aesthetics of Christmas were very popular there, although often reinterpreted into oddities like KFC for Christmas.
ThenElection
19hr ago
Just out of curiosity, I wanted to calculate the wealth Gini coefficient that comes from your life-cycle only model, and got numbers around 0.35. Interesting.
hydroacetylene
19hr ago
Interestingly, my understanding is that Oxbridge and the Ivies dominate in prestige, but US state flagship schools- EG UNC and University of Texas- are the workhorses for actual English-language research in such fields.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
19hr ago
Proposal: Had Brandon Eich been CTO, CFO, EIEIO, etc when he got the boot, and been just as famous, the content of your comment above would be basically identical except the substitution of his counterfactural position for "CEO" and some slightly different rationalization in item 2.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
19hr ago
I think this explains most of the troubles in university. We are not actually requiring rigor to earn a phd in any non-STEM field and thus the blind lead the blind. Dispassionate inquiry requires people to actually understand the subject and be able to research it and genate useful knowledge. It explains why most people even in politics think in simplistic cartoons and comic books. It explains as well how the US government was made to believe that they could collapse the Russian economy by simply unplugging it from the world bank — as though we could really stop buying Russian oil or fertilizer. I guarantee you that Russian political science students know muc( more about our system than we do of theirs. They know about our federalist system and the electoral college, I’m not sure there are a lot of people in America who know how Russia’s federation chooses its leaders.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
19hr ago
This isn't a very realistic model of academia.
"Back in my day" is one of the easiest and most natural criticisms to make in any field. I think you should take what this guy said with a grain of salt.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
20hr ago
Some hot takes you've got there.
"True believers" are, by definition, awfully hard to convince. But why should "anti-Muskites" act anything like Communists? People hate him because he flatters their outgroup, not because of some abstract reasoning. He personally did something that annoyed them, so they started showing symptoms of Elon Derangement. This is pretty normal.
HaroldWilson
20hr ago
Universities went from being places where autists can engage in niche hobbies to being to taking most people and people who have no real interest in the subject. How many english majors really want to spend four years engaging in bizarre books? They are there to party, please their parents by getting a degree and get an office job.
I don't think this is really true, certainly not of elite institutions. Oxbridge used to take all sorts of dullards who had the right background but were of limited disposition towards academics - think Bertie Wooster. Hence the gentleman's third
No_one
20hr ago
Thanks.
I hate it. (digital boardgames. It's such a lazy stupid thing to make. You've got a computer that at present can ran entire digital brainlets. Why not use said computing power to have an interesting game)
No_one
20hr ago
I skimmed it.
world’s large cities and a vast amount of other real estate, erasing entire nations from the map, forcing mass migrations, crippling ports and other trade facilities
And is that a big deal? 'Erasing entire nations from the map and mass migrations' is just history. Unlike the US which has 300 years of not much happening, we've got like 2 millenia of actual history in Europe. It's pretty much mostly forgotten by everyone normal. People are capable of dealing with history. Worst case they die out and are thoroughly forgotten. Not a problem for anyone involved in said history.
Reason I skimmed it is because I find him to be a noise generator.
He's just another primitivist engaged in wishful thinking about how this stinking complex industry he doesn't understand is all going to end, wholly ignoring that heavy industry is the source of state power and as such, indispensable. Short of some devastating bioweapon killing enough people to prevent sufficient populations to survive until the last book rotted, nothing can end industry. Even a devastating nuclear war would only result in a decline to late 19th century level in the unaffected parts of the world, followed by rapid rebuilding.
Greer's problem is that he is just way, way too pompous and takes himself too seriously. Whatever he says that's novel is wrong. Recently he has ticked off a particularly angry British man and .. yeah.
but from reading the back of the book
Well you should read it. It goes over, in sometimes tedious detail, about how the present-day environmental movement evolved. It's a pretty infuriating book and it makes very clear environmentalism is actually not about the environment.
curious_straight_ca
20hr ago
I mean with 300M people in a country, if just 5% of the top 99.99% at english lit talent want to be academics that's 1500 full-time jobs, too much for the top 10 institutions.
urquan
20hr ago
But neither Red nor Blue can be rightly deemed the tribe of individualists, per se.
I would argue that they are both quite individualist, but don't get marked as individualist because invididualism is so baked into American society that it's invisible to Americans. Both Republicans and Democrats discuss their ideas in terms of individual rights ("2A! Religious freedom! Freedom of speech! Right to life! My body, my choice! Constitutional right to an abortion, that SCOTUS took away! Trans people's right to exist! Civil rights!") and while there are grumblings of genuine collectivism in both parties, such views don't have much power.
Collectivism believes that rights come with duties -- and even the French Revolution's great document included disussion of "the rights and duties of man and the citizen." When's the last time American discourse had a real discussion of "the duties of man and the citizen?"
I mean, read some of the stuff even the French Revolutionaries wrote:
The obligations of each person to society consist in defending it, serving it, living in submission to the laws, and respecting those who are the agents of them.
Every citizen owes his services to the fatherland and to the maintenance of liberty, equality, and property whenever the law summons him to defend them.
No one is a virtuous man unless he is unreservedly and religiously an observer of the laws.
And my favorite two:
The one who violates the laws openly declares himself in a state of war with society.
The one who, without transgressing the laws, eludes them by stratagem or ingenuity wounds the interests of all; he makes himself unworthy of their good will and their esteem.
But of course American discourse involves no discussion of such things; they're anathema. Even the farthest of the far right would shudder at saying such things out loud! Even our legal system involves many complex financial instruments designed "by stratagem or ingenuity" to avoid taxation, and a major theory of American legal thought argues that there is nothing immoral about breaching a solemn contract!
Pure libertarians are definitely individualist, but also marginal, because most Americans have some level of collectivist ideals even if they fall well short of the global and historical norm.
but presumably those people just took their degree and left, right? They didn't stick around to become professors and shape the entire field.
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