There seem to be a fair number of major figures of Western history who held attitudes towards nonwhite people that were horrific by modern standards, but were also very philo-Semitic -- George Washington, Winston Churchill, and Theodore Roosevelt to name a few. Are there any notable historical figures who were like this but in reverse, i.e. usually consistent opponents of racism except for being anti-Semitic?
As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris,”
Dick Cheney - September 6, 2024
______________________
Cheney knows this isn’t about the left/right, elite/populist, policies of a single election.
It’s about stopping a man who has no respect for, is ignorant of, and is entirely incurious about the rare genius of our sometimes flawed but improvable Republic.
The founders knew there would be rascals and scoundrels and made Constitutional provisions for them. But Trump? James Madison had an amazing mind but I doubt even his imagination could have fathomed such a specimen.
“Kamala Harris will be standing on a riser behind her podium during our debate. That’s cheating!”
I think a great deal of the problem you're having here is that this is perhaps the seventh or so election that's been an "existential moment" according to the people who say Trump must be stopped, and far too many of them remember 2016-2020 as not being that bad, aside from a global pandemic that was also not that bad, except for all the draconian regulations that were enacted in reaction to it, by the people who say Trump must be stopped.
So, the people who are only mildly annoyed by Trump, rather than existentially annoyed by him, do not trust the latter crowd when they say this is an existential moment. This is in addition to the usual crowd who have been regularly annoyed by Democrats.
So when you repeat points like "existential moment" or "uniquely bad", you are hard to distinguish from someone who just wants a Democrat in the WH so badly that they are willing to say things like that, which means they infer you just want a Democrat in the WH really badly. And they're mostly regularly annoyed by that already.
I think it’s a shame that people can legitimately point to that hyperbolic take and slough off the fact that Trump was actually the first president in American history to try to circumvent the democratic process.
With the obscenity of 1/6/21 and the campaign to force Pence to recognize false electors this does raise the situation to something much more serious than Dick Cheney = Darth Vader or Mitt is a Mormon who put Seamus on the car roof for a vacation trip.
As I say elsewhere, the Republic will most likely survive a second Trump term. If you take him at his word - I know, you can never really do that - it will be a very ugly 4 years.
I’ll just add that I think you are exaggerating a bit with the 7th election being called existential.
Bob Dole and GHWB were ordinary Republicans, standup guys with records of heroic military service. There might have been a bit of hair on fire rhetoric from both sides in the Clinton era but the heat really didn’t get cranked up until post 9/11 and the Axis of Evil and the Coalition of the Willing rhetoric of Bush\Cheney
I do prefer Democratic policies to Republican and I would have been a bit disappointed if Romney or John McCain had prevailed but I knew they were solid American patriots and wouldn’t have lost any sleep over it.
"I’ll just add that I think you are exaggerating a bit with the 7th election being called existential."
2024, 2020, 2016, 2012, 2008, 2004, 2000. That's seven. If I squint, I can see how 2000 wasn't quite as bad, because it was the last election we had with 9/11 in our rearview, and that changed a lot. But it didn't keep Gore from admonishing the nation about what would happen to social security and the budget surplus.
I prefer Republican policies to Democrat (particularly on the economy and gun rights), but I wasn't terrifically bothered by Biden winning over Trump, on the premise that Biden was physically hale and I remember him being willing to send praise across the aisle - until I found he wasn't. But while I do know of a few Democrat voters who, like you, were okay with Romney or McCain, I noticed dramatically more Democratic rhetoric claiming they were going to wreck the nation.
Okay. My mistake to just count presidential elections.
I can’t remember the specifics of Gore’s pitch in 2000 but going into that election as a Dem I expected Bush W to be a pretty moderate Republican - compassionate conservatism and all - until after 9/11.
"I think a great deal of the problem you're having here is that this is perhaps the sixth or so election that's been an "existential moment" according to the people who say Trump must be stopped, and far too many of them remember 2016-2020 as not being that bad, aside from a global pandemic that was also not that bad, except for all the draconian regulations that were enacted in reaction to it, by the people who say Trump must be stopped."
Does it appear critically different from the original version?
I made a couple edits for clarity above just now. I had tapped out the comment on my phone while cooling down (sweating profusely) from a bike ride and made the typical two thumbs mistakes.
Yeah they had the guy who conquered the Gauls top of mind when they set things up, not the gasbag star of Celebrity Apprentice. That’s where we get into the realm of ‘difficult to imagine.’
I think "President who wants to declare himself King" would have been well within Madison's imagination. And the system he and his colleagues designed seems to have worked well enough to stop Trump once.
Where does "President who wants to declare himself King" come from? I have seen no indications of that, and it seems rather unlikely for a 78-year-old.
Barely; and the fact that a lot of people are willing to give him another crack at it is sobering.
And it isn’t even that he wanted to declare himself a king. That’s the least of it. The worst of it is that he wanted to make himself a king, but by having us all swallow what was obviously an enormous lie.
I try very hard to remain dispassionate, but it’s challenging sometimes.
This is a man who waged an intense and persistent campaign to get several young black teenagers executed (he agitated for NY to reinstate capital punishment specifically so it could be applied to these boys) for a crime that had been thoroughly proven to have been committed by someone else. And when he grew tired of that decided to get on board with the proposition that Barack Obama‘s birth certificate was a forgery. Plus all the other stuff….
Is it worth it? Quite a few of us seem to think it is.. can you ride the tiger?
Yes the system they designed held against a first attempt.
In a sane world the first attempt would disqualify him from a second. At least that’s what I think Madison would have hoped for. The Legislative branch is responsible for checking Executive corruption.
Mitch McConnell - March 13, 2021
“There’s no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day. No question about it. The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president.
The leader of the free world cannot spend weeks thundering that shadowy forces are stealing our country and then feign surprise when people believe him and do reckless things.”
Mitch McConnell - March 6, 2024
“It is abundantly clear that former President Trump has earned the requisite support of Republican voters to be our nominee for President of the United States. It should come as no surprise that as nominee, he will have my support.”
No, I have to disagree here. I don’t think Madison would have been able to imagine this. A single man using his superpower of utter shamelessness to bend one of the only two major political parties almost completely to his petulant will. Casting out legislators who refuse to kiss the ring. Those with the strength of character to say that in fact 2 + 2 does not equal 5.
Romney, Cheney, Kinzinger for example. Ryan’s exit was probably caused by Trump as well.
The Republic would more than likely make it through a second Trump presidency intact but it would be a civically corrosive affair and likely a very bumpy ride.
“CEASE & DESIST: I, together with many Attorneys and Legal Scholars, am watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election. It was a Disgrace to our Nation! Therefore, the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again. We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”
I know, he just says these things to be provocative, and I’m a fool to take it too seriously
Trump’s AG, William Barr testified that he told Trump that the stolen election ideas being tossed around were ‘all bullshit’ - his exact words - shortly before being fired.
Fired for having the strength of character to say that in fact 2 + 2 does not equal 5.
I expect a future Trump appointed Attorney General would be vetted for a more compliant nature.
Thanks for the replies. So I'm mostly with you both on Trump but possibly not with you on Cheney? I can't imagine a worse endorsement and if Cheney really wants Kamala to win he should have kept his mouth shut.
I’ll let Bernie Sanders explain why I think this was worth pointing out.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders - 9/8/24
“What I think Dick and Liz Cheney are saying is that in this existential moment in American history, it’s not just issues. Cheney and I agree on nothing — no issues. But what we do believe in is that the United States should retain its democratic foundations.
I applaud the Cheneys for their courage in defending democracy. Obviously, on all the issues we have very different points of view.”
No amount of class from Bernie will make me like Cheney and I don't think I'll be alone there. There is an anti-war component to Trump's support (recent endorsement from Tulsi Gabbard etc.) and this plays into his hands.
I saw "Alien Romulus" and have a few ideas/criticisms that I'd like feedback on. SPOILER ALERT...
1) The idea that they were able to find the xenomorph's carcass floating in the vastness of space is ridiculous and seemed like a cheap trick.
2) But embracing that plot convenience anyway just leads to another problem: when the cloned xenomorphs got loose on the space station and it ended up disabled thanks to the ruckus, why didn't Weyland-Yutani immediately send a rescue ship? Wasn't the Romulus/Remus space station playing host to perhaps their most important and valuable secret? It wouldn't make sense for them to lose track of it like they did.
3) That makes me think the movie's plot would have been better if Romulus/Remus had been a secret space station in a restricted area of that solar system. Normally, its communications traffic would be very low so it could keep a low profile. However, once the catastrophe happened, it started issuing an automatic distress beacon.
Instead of working on that hellish planet, the protagonists would have been meteoroid miners on that small, industrial ship. Normally, they steered clear of the space station, but after hearing the distress beacon, they decide to risk docking with it to steal whatever they can in the hopes of escaping impoverishment. They assume an accident has killed the crew but left any number of valuable components intact.
A more distant Weyland-Yutani military outpost would also receive the distress beacon, and would dispatch a team on a second space ship to the station. This would ratchet up the tension since the protagonists would have to get in and out of the station before the squad arrived, and it would set both groups up for a showdown late in the film.
4) Another thing I disliked was how quickly the facehugger/xenomorph lifecycle went in this film. Yes, I realize many liberties can be taken here since alien biology is unknown to us, but I also think the alien matured so fast that it probably violated the laws of physics (probably the law of conservation of mass). Growing from the size of a rattlesnake to the size of a large man means adding 200 lbs of mass to your body. Even if your metabolism is 100% efficient, that means consuming 200 lbs of food or somehow transforming 200 lbs worth of air into body mass (1 cubic meter of air is only 2.85 lbs), and we never see any indication the alien does that. (Kudos to the novelization of the original "Alien" movie for including a brief scene after the chestburster scene where the crew discovers their food pantry room has been ransacked.)
It would have been better if the protagonists had docked with the space station at least 24 hours after it had been disabled. That would have provided enough time, per what we saw in the first and third films, for chestbursters who emerged from the station's crew to have matured into adult aliens.
5) Why were the pulse rifles in "Alien Romulus" more advanced than the ones in "Aliens"? The latter takes place 30 years after the former, so why would weapons technology go backwards?
LLMs have all but snuffed out the poetry of scam dating site emails.
A couple years ago with ChatGPT’s arrival, gems like the following disappeared from my junk folder like buffalo from the plains and sadly I don’t think we’ll ever see writing like it again:
Subject: Looking for a someone to have sex-related gender along with
I am actually a charming that is hopeless and try to strongly believe that there is something great in every person. When I'm feeling harmed, I'm sincere about my desires and also am truthful. I'm seeking an every bit as good friend who levels to brand new traits and is actually an outstanding and also unbiased communicator.
Check out my bio.
What a beguiling mix of optimism, vulnerability and sexual adjacency. Was I the only one who collected these? (Probably yes)
Just a few years ago (2020), I often saw Google Translate do translations about that bad, sometimes to the point of being funny. Sadly, it has now improved enough that they are no longer funny (still doesn't hold a candle to LLM based translation though, apart from the fact that it doesn't hallucinate or skip things like LLMs sometimes do).
Yes, improvements to Google Translate probably better explain the sudden disappearance of such emails than LLM adoption.
As an aside, the email would actually serve as strangely appropriate (and grammatically consistent) correspondence from E.E. Cummings’ title character anyone in his famous “anyone lived in a pretty how town.”
"Sex-related gender" is certainly a novel phrase 😀 Next time you're in some discussion about gender matters, try lobbing it in as "oh yes, this is what all the cool kids are using now, didn't you know?" 😁
I'm reading How To Win Friends and Influence People and did a double take when I came across a story about a company trying to hire a "P.H.D. in Computer Science". This is a book written in *1936*. I know that before electrical computers were invented, the term referred to teams of people who did rote calculations by hand, but even so, I can't imagine that there would have been such a thing as "computer science" back then, let alone one worthy of PHDs. I wish I knew what this was referring to and what "computer science" PHDs did in the 30s.
The edition I'm reading was apparently published in 2009, and so it's possible that they sneakily edited in a later story. But it's still surprising since the book is packed full of references to the 30s, and this is the first time I've seen any reference to anything after that. Why would they so clumsily insert a modern story, and then do it in only one place and nowhere else?!
I’m enjoying the attempts in these comments to argue that a reference to a PhD in computer science in the 1930s is a plausible. Curious to see how they’ll explain the Stevie Wonder reference in a later chapter!
(Indeed, more modern anecdotes were added in later editions.)
Oh you're right, I didn't even pick up on the Stevie Wonder thing. I did notice a reference to Disney World in a later chapter, as well as an entire chapter talking about TV ads, and another one talking about BF Skinner including quotes from 70s books. It's a real shame they inserted all the more modern stuff, because I think it detracts from the book, and the TV ad chapter is completely incoherent anyway.
There were edits like that in the later editions of HtWFaIP; it's been long enough that I don't recall any examples offhand, but I definitely remember noticing them then.
And my father had to get his Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering, because Cornell didn't have a Comp Sci department in 1960. But the NE department had the best computers, so he became the man for doing neutron transport calculations in a submarine reactor (I think). And later taught graduate Computer Science.
So, while "Computer" was certainly a term in 1930 and might have wound up in the same sentence as "Science", I'm pretty sure nobody doing popular writing in that era would have talked about a "Ph.D. in Computer Science".
A lot of academic computer science in those days was more like a branch of mathematics than engineering, dealing with stuff like defining mathematically rigorous abstract models of computation and figuring out what sorts of problems you could solve with one model or another. Both Turing Machines and Alonzo Church's Lambda Calculus were first proposed in 1936, for example.
Okay, so it looks like punchcards were "computer science" from 1890 to the 1940s, but the first Computer Science Doctoral program wasn't started until 1962. So the question is now whether "a PhD in Computer Science" could be loose terminology for the fields involving punchcards or other calculations (like looking for a PhD in Secretary)..
ChatGPT says that the first PhD in Computer Science was in 1965, Richard Wexelblat at University of Pennsylvania, dissertation title "A Bound on the Number of States in a One-Dimensional Iterative Automaton". Previously, computer science research was done as a part of mathematics, electrical engineering, or physics.
At least at night, when wearing a headlamp. I look over and see pairs of glowing yellow eyes silently staring at me from shadowy forms, bobbing and blinking in an inhuman manner.
Tech tip of the day. You know when you try to get on public WiFi, but can’t get the “Accept Terms and Conditions” page to show up to actually join? That’s because the network is getting tripped up with encryption. What almost always works is visiting an unencrypted site that uses http (not https) but they’re pretty hard to find these days for good reason.
Anyways, visiting http://neverssl.com does the trick. It’s a site that’s not encrypted, specifically for that purpose. Happy browsing!
Another good try is nmcheck.gnome.org . It's used by default in Ubuntu to redirect you to the captive portal, but I've used it on other computer and even my phone when the page didn't want to load otherwise.
Review of the fourth episode of the Rings of Power.
It's better, in that things happen and it moves more quickly. We don't get Numenor, Cirdan, Celebrimbor, Annatar, or the Dwarves; it's mostly in Rhun and switching back and forth between there, Elrond and Galadriel heading out to Eregion, and Isildur and company wandering around doing something (I honestly have no idea what they were trying to achieve there).
So at least by sticking to only three concurrent sub-plots it's less messy. Still a little boring, however.
Let's get through this one by one. I'm going to cover each sub-plot as one block, rather than skipping back and forth as the episode does:
(1) Elrond and Galadriel go off on an expedition to Eregion because they've heard nothing from Celebrimbor and Gil-galad is concerned. Galadriel has the wind taken out of her sails because Elrond is given command of the expedition and she's under his command. She is still a bitch about things, Elrond is getting sassy (he's also growing out his hair and it's at the curly locks stage). Maybe with Elves it's the same as with Samson! All their strength is in their hair! Now that his hair is growing back, Elrond has found the cojones to stand up to Girlboss Glads and tell her, more or less, "my way or the highway". Which she does not appreciate, hence the bitchiness and passive-aggression. She is also way paranoid (the wind blows? it's Sauron doing it!) which may or may not be justified. Anyhow,. they head off over the Axa bridge (which made me laugh because over here AXA is an insurance company - product placement or just unfortunate coincidence?) but when they get to the bridge, OH NO IT BROKED!
Elrond says it looks like it was hit by lightning, Galadriel demurs and says it must have been Sauron because no earthly force could do this. They now have a choice of two alternative routes: go north, add two weeks to travel time, or go south through (cue ominous music) Tyrn Gorthad. Galadriel gets a ring vision and says there is evil there, but Elrond distrusts her ring and says that's where we're going.
Galadriel is right because Tyrn Gorthad means the Barrow-downs. But this is a thousand or so years too early for the barrows and the barrow-wights, you say? Remember, this show don't need no stinkin' timelines. So yeah, they go south and yeah, they encounter barrow wights and yeah, one of the group of Diverse Elves bites the dirt (there's a red-haired elf I thought would be the one because he's one of the two white guys, not counting Elrond, but no, they killed off the black Elf. How racist!)
Then they run into some Orcs and the dark-haired white Elf gets an arrow in the abdomen, and while they're all huddled behind a fallen tree trying to muffle his cries so the Orcs don't track them by sound, Galadriel has her hands on him and the riing magically activates and magically heals him. It even makes the arrow magically fall out of him instead of them having to pull it out. How convenient!
The healing makes no sense because that's not one of Nenya's stated powers, but if the show needs magic healing, then it gets magic healing. Galadriel hands the ring to Elrond and tells him and the survivors to get out of Dodge while she distracts the Orcs. She goes off and girlbosses the bunch of Orcs and the other Elves pause to appreciate how she sacrificed herself for them, but Elrond says in the neo-Sindarin (according to the subtitles) no, she did it to save the ring, then he stomps off. Told ya he was getting sassy.
Anyway, this is the bit I fast-forwarded through, as Galadriel girlbosses the Orcs with twirls and skips and flaming arrows and what-not, but just as she is about to ride off (I don't remember where the horse came from), she stops a moment too long to lecture them, so Adar captures her.
I liked that bit, mainly because as he knocks her off the horse via chain (yeah, the Orcs had hooks on chains or maces on chains or something), she aims a flaming arrow at him and he quenches it with his one gauntleted hand and we get the best moment in this episode because it is canon undiluted, genuine Quenya from Tolkien: "Elen síla lúmenn’ omentielvo, heruni Alatáriel". End of episode and a good place to end! Though I wish Joseph Mawle were still playing Adar, Sam Hazeldine is okay but he doesn't have that 'something' Mawle had.
(2) The Stranger and the Harfoots in Rhun. Oh gosh, I dislike this sub-plot *so* much. Let's grit our teeth and power on through, though. The Stranger and the Harfoots have been separated. Stranger goes looking for them, manages to stumble across Tom Bombadil, who has a nice little green patch of land and animals in the middle of the desert. A gust of wind (conveniently) blows the map out of Stranger's hands while he's talking to Bombadil, he chases it, it gets impaled on a tree branch, while Stranger is trying to get it back, the tree swallows him up.
Tom eventually comes along to coax Old Man Willow - sorry, it's Old Man Ironwood this time (hold on a second while I have a little weep about the paucity of imagination in this show) - to let Stranger go, takes Stranger home with him, gives him a bath (where all this spare water in the middle of the desert is coming from is never explained), he sings (yes of course he does) and Stranger thinks he hears a woman (Goldberry) but Tom plays coy and says there's only him and the Stranger there.
Anyway, we get the whole "with great power comes great responsibility" speech from Tom as he persuades Stranger that "you're a wizard, Gandalf!" and that it's his job to fight the Dark Wizard who may be allying with Sauron (there's a fire metaphor used here but I'm not going to inflict it on you). Bombadil is 'the Hermit', you see, and many moons ago the Dark Wizard also ate honey by Tom's fire (this episode abounds in the kind of unintended double entendres where you can easily visualise the porn movie version) and wanted to know about harnessing magic, too. But now he controls a lot of Rhun and wants to control more, he's ambitious you see, and if he links up with Sauron then it'll be bad news. They seem to be hinting damn hard the Dark Wizard is Saruman, but who knows?
So much for Stranger and Bombadil, on to the Harfoots. Oh, but before I do - turns out the Tusken raiders hunting the Stranger and the Harfoots are called Gaudrim. Name meaning unsure; "-rim" is the general suffix for "people, folk" and online source claims that "gau(d)" translates as "device or machine". If that means "People of the Device/Machine", and they're subservient to the Dark Wizard, it could be another hint that he is Saruman (who was the most interested in machinery).
As for their personal names, they seem to be taken from an IKEA catalogue: Glüg and Brânk? Dark Wizard realises this bunch are not really the smartest henchmen in the roster but since they're all he's got so far, he tells them to concentrate on finding the Harfoots and he'll deal with the Istar himself.
The Harfoots (Nori and Poppy) meet a Stoor in the desert, and immediately he and Poppy start making googly eyes at each other. Nori is no more impressed by this budding romance than I am, and they make the Stoor take them back to his village. Poppy and Nori are very surprised by the village life and Harfoots, I mean Stoors, living in holes because it's so alien to their traditions. Turns out the Stoors really are like the Harfoots, as the leader, Gundabale somebody or other, decides to tie up Poppy, Nori and Merimac (the guy who brought them back to the village) and in the morning kick them out into the desert, where she knows the Gaudrim are hunting them. Just like our Harfoot psychopaths would do! The family resemblance is unmistakable!
In fact, Nori says as much, that if Sadoc were in the leader's place, he would have done the same. Once Gundabale learns the name Sadoc Burrows, she takes Nori off for a small history lesson. Turns out that many moons ago, a Stoor named Roderic Burrows had visions of a place with streams of cold water, a place he called the Sûzat (another real Tolkien word, this will one day be the Shire). He set off with a caravan of followers to find it and promised to come back and lead the rest of the Stoors there.
Is that where the Harfoots are from, and have Poppy and Nori come to lead them there? Alas, Nori bursts the bubble that they have no home, they just kept wandering, and Burrows never found the Sûzat. I suppose if there ever is a season three, they'll give us the Fallowhides who *did* find it and settle there.
Okay, so now some of the Gaudrim turn up in the Stoor village looking for the Harfoots; Gundabale pretends she doesn't know about them, but the lead Gaudrim threatens her that unless she hands them over, he'll come back with the Dark Wizard and then the Stoors will learn why the Gaudrim all wear masks (because of the curse which they wanted the wizard to remove last episode, presumably). End of sub-plot so far!
(3) Theo, Arondir, Isildur, Estrid (Isildur's potential love interest) and the surviving Southlanders hanging out in the ruins of Pelargir (which, again, is all kinds of messed-up because it shouldn't be in ruins yet *or* be an abandoned colony of Numenor but by now I should know better than to expect fidelity to lore). A lot happens and yet nothing happens, and I'm not really clear on what is supposed to be going on here. This is the part where I fast-forwarded the most.
Theo manages to get himself captured, Isildur and the gang go searching for him, there's something about Wildmen (I swear on my life they're copying Game of Thrones here because of the coincidence of Wildmen of Dunland), Arondir finds out Estrid is one of the Wildings and wants to use her to find their base, yadda yadda yadda, there's another pointless monster in a mucky bog, they find Theo, an Ent and Entwife turn up and wreck the joint, Arondir speaks to them in Sindarin and there's more yadda yadda yadda and that's about it. I don't know what the point of all of this was.
Roll end credits with Bombadil's song playing, which at least is better than the original lyrics of a part of a song they used in the episode. They used "gropin'" to rhyme with "hoping", you see what I mean about the easily visualised porn version? EDIT: Whoops, got that one wrong; I rewatched to see if I had it correct and no. The actual lyrics, sung by Tom while we get to see Not-Yet-Gandalf from the waist up naked in the tub having a bath, are: "Down sinks the sun in the west/Soon you'll be gropin'" to rhyme with "open" in the next couplet. However, nekkid wizard and "groping" in conjunction = in front of my salad?
Summing up: better pacing, more movement forward. They should have stuck to cutting down number of "and now this happens here and that is going on there and over yonder another thing" in the first three episodes, maybe give one episode to each sub-plot so it could be more fully developed.
The scenery is the best part of this show, even if they over-CGI it. Elrond at least seems to be growing a pair now that he's dealing with Galadriel, though they seem to be introducing pointless CONFLICT CONFLICT CONFLICT for dramatic tension between the pair of them; if Galadriel is too paranoid and stubborn about "everything is Sauron", Elrond is being too stubborn about "the rings are evil and you're wrong to use them".
I want to see what happens next with Adar and Galadriel, even though I do think - so far - Hazeldine is not able to deliver in the part. This episode was better than the preceding three, but the Isildur sub-plot is really just spinning its wheels. We *know* he can't die, so there's no suspense at all in such scenes as "oh no, a bog monster! oh no, Orcs!"
I can't think of a topic more likely to stir the passions. On some level I feel the idea the discourse should take place calmly is based on a flawed anthropology. Zeal is an effect of love. I think the alpha discussion below is great.
Well theres a lot more men than women around, so dating advice is less about "how to get a man" and more "PSA you can get away with really high standards even if you were an ugly duckling in highschool". I think theres a fair bit of that, just its not usually framed as dating advice, more "Ugh I cant believe this dude was *so horrible* to me".
I think a part of the reason is generally fewer women in the rationalsphere, but another part is that the mainstream advice for women sucks less than the mainstream advice for men, so there was less pressure to develop an alternative knowledge base.
What I mean is that e.g. the book "The Rules" is more or less mainstream advice in a condensed form, but anything analogical written for men would be decried as toxic and sexist. The mainstream dating advice for women seems to be unapologetically about "what should he do for you, and how to make him do it", while the mainstream dating advice for men seems to me about "what should you do for her" (spoiler: "women are mysterious, always be polite and buy her flowers").
So I guess a good starting place for a rational advice for women might be to review "The Rules" (maybe as a part of ACX book reviews). I am not the target audience, but I would love to read it out of curiosity.
On the other hand, the fact that mainstream not-obviously-stupid advice for women exists, doesn't imply that the advice is actually good. It probably also follows some taboos, and optimizes for what the audience wants to hear rather than what is true. It is a better starting point, but still just a starting point that needs to be reviewed carefully.
It also depends on what is your goal. For a typical man who reads about dating advice, the goal is "getting laid, preferably with hotter women". From epistemic perspective, this is convenient, because you can try many things and get a quick feedback on what works. (There is a problem with placebo effect, namely that if you try X and succeed, maybe it really was X, and maybe it was just your greater confidence.) With things that have longer feedback loops, like a happy long-term relationship, here even the famous PUAs often fail. I believe that still makes the advice useful, because although short-term success does not imply long-term success, short-term failure means that you don't get a chance for anything long-term. Useful, but incomplete.
What would be the measurable short-term goals for a women's PUA camp?
If I tried to give some advice to straight women, here are some random things:
* The fact that a man wants to have one-night sex with you is very tiny evidence for him wanting to also have a long-term relationship with you (regardless of what he says, because that's probably just instrumental to getting the one-night sex). Similarly, if your photo on social media gets hundreds of likes, it only means you have boobs. I am not judging anyone for wanting one-night sex, I just say to keep firmly in mind that it does *not* imply anything else.
* If you initially don't like a guy, but your best friend insists that he is awesome and you should definitely date him, and keeps pressuring you until you give the guy a chance... don't be surprised if a few months or years later you find out that he is cheating on you with your best friend. You already had enough evidence that she wanted him, and maybe your intuition also tried to tell you something important.
* While it is technically true that you can still get pregnant at 40, consider two things. First, it will limit *how many* children you can have, especially if you change your mind later. For example, if you think that two kids are optimal, and ten years later you decide that actually maybe three... you can still do that if you started in your 20s, but not if you started in your 40s. Second, if you start looking for a reliable partner when you are 40, the best ones were already taken long ago, and the remaining ones probably have some baggage *and* you will have to compete for them against women ten years younger. If you and your partner agreed that you will first spend a decade together without kids, and have kids later, remember that he still has an option to replace you by a younger woman when he finally decides that it's time for him to have kids.
But this is more like long-term strategic considerations, while you probably want specific tactical advice for how (and whether) to get the man in front of you right now.
"The fact that a man wants to have one-night sex with you is very tiny evidence for him wanting to also have a long-term relationship with you (regardless of what he says, because that's probably just instrumental to getting the one-night sex). Similarly, if your photo on social media gets hundreds of likes, it only means you have boobs. I am not judging anyone for wanting one-night sex, I just say to keep firmly in mind that it does *not* imply anything else."
That this is advice that you feel should be given suggests that it is not currently being given, which surprises me. Maybe it's just that I'm from an older generation where we were warned "men only want one thing", or that I'm not in my 20s anymore so yeah it should be self-evident that if you're (say) cohabiting for eight years and he hasn't proposed yet, it is *not* going to happen even if right now you feel ready for wedding bells and kids.
Not condemning men for their biology, but yeah. You have boobs and are not actively repellant, he wants to bang, but after he gets into your knickers? To quote Shakespeare and Sonnet 129:
Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,
Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so,
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
> That this is advice that you feel should be given suggests that it is not currently being given, which surprises me.
It is the kind of advice that needs to be repeated at least 100 times, because the first 99 times people are likely to miss it. Probably everyone heard it, but also everyone believes that "this one situation is special".
> it should be self-evident that if you're (say) cohabiting for eight years and he hasn't proposed yet, it is *not* going to happen
The easiest way to waste eight years is one day at a time. And it's eight years of hearing "definitely yes, but not right now", and sometimes there are plausible excuses. And the woman may also kinda want it, but also procrastinate on it. Setting deadlines means making hard decisions, and most people avoid that.
And the part that age matters is actively denied in current culture. We are all forever young, and damn any sexist who claims otherwise.
Two women independently told me that it happened to them. I have never read about anything like that online or in media. So either this is a rare situation that just accidentally happened twice in my bubble, or it is a frequent situation and there is some taboo against mentioning it. I have no data to prove either way.
(The hypothetical taboo would be that most advice for women comes from women and is given in the spirit of "we sisters need to trust and support each other". This situation suggests the opposite. The mainstream advice for women is allowed to be cynical about men, less so about other women, and especially not about friends.)
For the record, I think it is on average *good* for women to trust each other's advice, but I think the most value here comes from your friend noticing a red flag that you missed.
> I don't really get what the motivation would be for the best friend, if they want them themselves how does pushing them on someone else help?
The situation is that the best friend already tried to get the guy for herself, but she failed. (She probably didn't disclose this detail to you.) Now if the guy is hot, he will soon get some girl. If it's you, at least he stays in her proximity, so she can try again later... and as your friend she will probably have a lot of seemingly innocent opportunity to meet him. If instead it is some strange girl, he might disappear out of her life completely.
That's fascinating. It's interesting how there are things like this that are counterintuitive at first glance, but make sense once explained. And also interesting to learn that people behave like this.
I wish there was an AI tool for people on autistic spectrum that would observe the social situation around them and then quietly explain it using plain words.
Sometimes the understanding is hard not because the correct explanation is complex, but because this is not something *I* would ever do, so the right hypothesis doesn't even occur to me. Once someone points in the right direction, it suddenly becomes obvious.
Perhaps there are some simple heuristics such that if you memorize them and remember to apply them to all confusing situations, they could actually explain a lot of them. Such as: "Consider the possibility that the person is lying to you. Try to think of three different explanations why making you believe X could be useful for them."
One of the most frustrating things about the feckless Western leaders of this century is their continued refusal to wake up to the reality of Russia’s intentions. All these bushes, obamas, merkels, sarkozys, etc. and up to the current crop of nincompoops - clueless dolts still looking for Putin’s soul while being scared of his shadow.
The historic Soviet Empire and the fictional Centauri one both relinquished power gracefully, right up to the point where some tragically damned revanchist decided he wanted it all back the way that it was.
Many Thanks! Yeah, I don't recall anything particularly bloody happening when all the *stans split off the former USSR... Good point! ( I can't comment about the Centauri case - didn't watch the relevant TV :-) )
<mildSnark>
Did the fission of the USSR count as the political equivalent of a spallation reaction? :-)
> Sorry, is the principle here just might makes right?
I think Americans who argue that they can interfere in other countries without any reverse interference are the ones arguing that position. I’m not. I’m saying “sh1t goes on”.
Also I doubt the Russian interference stories in specific, we were all a bit burned by Russia gate.
I don't see anyone here actually arguing that position though?
One could believe that Russia, Iran, and China interfering with democracy in America is bad, and also America interfering with democracy in Argentina or Colombia is also bad.
What's better than neo-liberalism? A free-market economy makes nearly everyone better off in the long run because trade and innovation are maximized. Most people want a safety-welfare net to some degree as well, and it seems we can have it both ways, both relatively free markets but also a welfare state to a degree, a degree we can always argue about endlessly.
For those who want to overturn the donkey-cart, what do you think is better than neo-liberalism and why?
I read Freddie DeBoer and try to understand his Marxism sometimes. I read him because he is a great writer of English prose, but he's horrible about explaining his Marxism. Recently he wrote that (I'm paraphrasing) his Marxism is rooted in the exploitation of the worker by capital. (He is apparently against it.)
Exploitation means "to get value out of", and I don't see why that's a bad thing, but I intuit that those who use exploitations in a bad sense mean that something negative has happened to the worker in order to squeeze the value out of them, a dramatic example being a pimp forcing a hooker to sell her body for money even though she would prefer not to were her situation just slightly better.
And most all of us are like that hooker from time to time on our jobs metaphorically to some degree usually much less.
Marx also says we are alienated from our work. I agree entirely, although, again, it's a matter of degree and varies a lot. Plenty of people feel right at home at work despite the capitalist system and all. But some of us just work for a paycheck and don't identify with our jobs.
It drives me crazy that modern-day Marxists seem unwilling to describe a toy version of what the world might look like under Communism. How would our work change? Please illustrate the differences in significant detail. Feel free to speculate and idealize. Or to speculate and pragmatize.
Communists just seem so intellectually cowardly these days.
However I will admit to an anti-neoliberal point of view I might buy into somewhat if someone could make it coherent. Neoliberals care about economic growth, i.e., the future. But let's say we are willing to sacrifice future economic growth for a near-term present that is better for everyone living in this century. Economics is about tradeoffs. What can we buy for the next 60 years if we trade away future growth for it? It must be something but what? I might be willing to make that Faustian bargain...
I'm not in the donkey-cart flipping business myself, but most of the reasons I've heard have nothing to do with the line of arguments you're pursuing, and rather focus on some utopian or semi-utopian image of a wonderful past or a glorious future that ought to implemented.
I haven't heard any serious challenges to the neoliberal state you describe. Some idea-trees, like degrowth, try to masquerade as such, but as soon as you scratch the surface you find only vibes and no serious policy proposals or institution design.
Otherwise the only other real response would be that if inequality grows faster than the overall economy the median standard of living can still drop even if the mean is rising.
Also if you want to see an interesting toy model of communist society Towards a New Socialism is probably the most compelling one, it seems like most free-market types shift their opinion on the viability of communism at least a little if they read it.
This substack post makes a decent argument that in the 80s most of the academic Marxists became neo-liberals because when they got down to it they couldn't agree that exploitation of labor was morally wrong, but they could all agree that inequality was wrong. The author even mentions Freddie specifically, writing "nowadays, when kids like Freddie deBoer come along insisting that 'Marxism is not an egalitarian philosophy,' I nod my head in agreement, but I want to respond 'Yes! That’s why nobody is a Marxist any more.'"
They didn’t become neo-liberals but other non Marxist forms of socialism. That’s a good article nevertheless, it at least engages in a critique of Marxism from the left, which is unusual. Largely because most proclaimed Marxists aren’t actually Marxists at all.
I saw that. It's interesting. I saw another post responding and arguing against it, but I didn't read that one.
What confuses me most about Marxists is the History Marxists. I think they mostly believe that history is determined by economics and class struggle and are pretty deterministic overall, but why do they have to call themselves Marxists? (Why do so many people on this site have to call themselves Rationalists?) What else do they believe? For instance, a pretty good historian like Chris Wickham identifies as a Marxist, but I've read a couple of his books and don't see where the Marxism is. It's like reading Freddie. You know he's a Marxist because he says he is, but where's the Marxism in his writing? I can never find it. Or maybe it's just a free pass for him to be against everything.
I honestly don’t think that Freddie has read Marx at all. Most of his writings are anti woke, and sometimes pro left. He’s pro trans but that’s a socially libertarian position.
It’s not unusual for Marxists to not explain the future society except in the vaguest terms, so he’s not alone there. That’s starts with Marx. It’s relatively new for modern Marxists to not use any Marxist terminology at all.
Well, a central part of Marx's theory is that history is determined by economics and class struggle and that using his theory you could predict what will happen in the future. Now nothing he predicted actually happened, but that's just details.
> a pimp forcing a hooker to sell her body for money even though she would prefer not to were her situation just slightly better<
I don’t think this is a good example of what you are getting at. She might just prefer to keep more of what she makes given what value the pimp brings to the table. It’s one thing for capitalism to provide the machinery by which workers can be gainfully employed (or exploited) but a girl’s got that out of the gate; pimping is a protection racket, pure and simple.
Now you've got me thinking about all the things I've heard about pimps and hookers over the years, some of it from their own mouths. At least in the US, where prostitution is illegal almost everywhere, most hookers don't make any money. It all goes to the pimp. You can think of it as an abusive poly relationship. The women are emotionally dependent on the pimp, the pimp gives the women affection but makes them fuck for money they turn over to him. They are a family of sorts.
There are plenty of exceptions to that, of course. But it is not generally a protection racket, at least in the US.
The problem is lack of definitions here. You are equating capitalism with neo-liberalism but prior to the 1980s, the term wasn’t used and the neo liberal era is a clear break from the post war era.
You are right about Freddie, no indication that he has really read Marx.
> Exploitation means "to get value out of", and I don't see why that's a bad thing,
Marx was often using the term in the neutral sense.
> but I intuit that those who use exploitations in a bad sense mean that something negative has happened to the worker in order to squeeze the value out of them
Well the bad thing is the “surplus” value that is taken from the worker. Not dissimilar to rent that landlords exploit from peasants. In fact theories about exploitation and unearned income often started with rent - seeking ricardo.
>Well the bad thing is the “surplus” value that is taken from the worker. Not dissimilar to rent that landlords exploit from peasants. In fact theories about exploitation and unearned income often started with rent - seeking ricardo.
How do we measure that surplus? I think most anti-capitalists don't value the risk-taking involved in capitalism. You start a business hoping to get rich, but the odds are you will fail and lose most of your capital. If you are one of the 10% of businesses that succeed, all of your profits are viewed as "rent" by many anti-capitalists. But obviously it isn't rent if you risked losing it all! But if you put it in those terms, few will sympathize with the capitalist because you have just equated them to a gambler, and almost nobody empathizes with gamblers.
Rent-seeking does exist but I'm not very good at identifying it or distinguishing it clearly from risk-taking.
> Rent-seeking does exist but I'm not very good at identifying it or distinguishing it clearly from risk-taking.
There is not necessarily a clear line. Things can be part this and part that.
Let me give you a different example: from the perspective of the "labor | land | capital" trichotomy, talented people (probably most readers of this website) should be considered a combination of "labor" and "land", that is "workers" and "renters" simultaneously. So if we happen to get good salaries, it does not mean that the society is actually nice to workers. It just means that we got lucky to also be part-renters.
Ok, this sounds weird, if you interpret "land" and "rent" literally. But if you look for the reasons behind the "labor | land | capital" trichotomy, you can more generally define "labor" as "that which costs human time and effort", "land" as "that which is in a limited supply", and "capital" as "that which can flexibly move anywhere". And from that perspective, high intelligence or talent kinda resembles the "land" category; there is a limited supply of smart people, and companies have to compete for them, which gives them the leverage. But it also resembles "labor", because the only way the smart person can use the high intelligence to produce results is to work, i.e. also spend time and effort. (You can't simply send your IQ to work alone, while you stay dumb at home and relax.) Thus, from an economical perspective, a smart person is a hybrid of "labor+land"; a worker with a leverage.
Now let's look at the capitalists from this perspective. Venture capitalists are the pure "capital" guys. Those who build startups are "labor+capital" hybrids, because they have to spend a lot of time and work hard to make it succeed. Actually, more like "labor+land+capital" hybrids, because it also requires some rare skills. The categories are not exclusive.
If this was purely about the capital, the capitalist wouldn't mind if others (including the employees) bought a share in the company. Money is fungible. And this is indeed how it works when the company is traded publicly. But many companies are not; and those are the ones where the owner has a leverage, that is the "land" aspect of the business.
> You start a business hoping to get rich, but the odds are you will fail and lose most of your capital.
This is part of the story, but not the whole story. (It is the whole story if you are a venture capitalist.) For example, if you approached most people who are starting a company, and offered to provide them money in return for a share in the company, I suppose many would refuse you. Partially it is because they also provide work, but even if you said "ok, I will pay 60% of the money for 30% of the ownership", they would probably still refuse you. If you proposed to them to make it a cooperative where everyone provides a part of money, they would almost certainly refuse you.
The surplus is easy to measure. Just imagine the company didn’t distribute profits to shareholders but was a partnership of workers. That’s the surplus.
I’m not a Marxist and there are more coherent answers to Marx than your response which isn’t wrong either. Nevertheless falling wage levels relative to the rest of GDP is a problem.
Sure, I think there's two deep problems with neoliberalism as it currently exists in the US.
While there's a lot of variability in definitions of neoliberalism, a core component is redistribution and the welfare state. Basically, capitalism is really unfair, we want the state to bleed off some excess profit and give it to poor and middle-income people and that will make everyone happier. The issue is that this has bad externalities that we can't really control. For example, conservatives for a long time have criticized the welfare state for creating dependency among people and for building large, unaccountable bureaucracies. Which is a pretty good description of Medicare and Medicaid. We have large bureaucracies with poorly aligned incentive structures that a lot of elderly people are deeply dependent on for critical services that are so poorly run financially that it's a major drive of US federal debts and deficits in ways that are looking...very concerning for America's long-run financial health.
Secondly, and I think the Marxists are absolutely right on this, commoditization is a very real thing and it's really bad. I'm thinking very specifically of the old SSC review of the "Two Income Trap" (1), where women left the home to enter the workforce and doubled the family income but most of that extra money went towards taxes, child care, tutoring and housing in better school districts, and a 2nd car so she could drive to work. That's not to say that there's no financial advantage to women entering the workforce, just that a lot of that extra money is going to buy explicit substitute goods in the market for things women previously did in the home outside of the market. This greatly overexaggerates the benefits of liberalism and often drives people into making suboptimal decisions. A lot of social interaction in stuff like bowling leagues has been commoditized by things like social media in really harmful ways.
At this point how people define neoliberalism gets really important, because neoliberalism, or at least state redistribution of some of the gains of capitalism, seems to be a convergence point for most modern governments but there's a lot of variance in how that's executed at to what extent. China can seem to be very neoliberal until you dig into how state-owned enterprises actually function.
I don’t have a great alternative to point to, but the big selling point of neo-liberalism, that we can have maximal trade and innovation while protecting people, has fallen pretty flat.
At this point, I think many people, just just populists, are skeptical about claims that the losses of liberalization can and will be made up in any meaningful way.
I think you're correct. In theory we could have used some of the gains from offshoring to recompense factory workers who lost their jobs due to it. But we don't do that. The problem is that same mindset which says "Global trade is good!" tends to also say "Compensating losers is bad!". I think that global trade is good and compensating our fellow countrymen who lose from it is good, but that seems to be a minority position.
> The problem is that same mindset which says "Global trade is good!" tends to also say "Compensating losers is bad!". I think that global trade is good and compensating our fellow countrymen who lose from it is good, but that seems to be a minority position.
I agree with you... but that's just further evidence that this is a minority position.
I suspect that most people understand "global trade is good" as "good for *me*" rather than "good for *everyone*". Both can be true, but the former is the important part, so if the latter has some exceptions, no one cares (unless they are one of them).
>I think that global trade is good and compensating our fellow countrymen who lose from it is good, but that seems to be a minority position.
I would suggest some caveats to the "global trade is good" part. Yes, autarky is inefficient, but it is also true that supply lines wrapped around the globe are vulnerable. Theoretically, insurance markets could incorporate that vulnerability in prices, but, having seen Covid's effects, I'm not at all convinced that that really works very well. There is something to be said for actively trying to shorten supply lines, at least to lessen some of the worst vulnerabilities.
Yes, but without that you don’t really have “neo” liberalism any more, and you’re causing a lot of damage and anger which will sooner or later find an outlet, see Brexit and President Trump for examples. It’s honestly a big problem.
I think few people were ever actually "neo-liberals" in the sense that it means a market economy with free global trade plus some redistribution of the profits to make things fairer. It's merely been a compromise position for politicians in recent decades. Actual people tend to be either all in on markets or all in on more redistribution. So politicians pretend to stake a middle-ground, but in areas where the market wins, it wins everything. In areas where the government intervenes, the market becomes too distorted to function properly (real estate, education, etc.)
OK, I’m not sure we’re operating from the same understanding of the word, but what I mentioned was the basic neo-liberal “bargain” and was certainly talked up by Clinton et al, and even the Republicans used to talk about rising tides lifting boats etc. People were sold on this plan.
If the plan had been presented as “we’re going to send all your jobs overseas and replace them with delivery gigs and fentanyl”, the pushback would have come a lot sooner.
If we hadn't spent the trillions we got from China (in the form of treasury purchases and the resultant low interest rates) in Iraq and Afghanastan we could have easily afforded to compensate ex factory workers had there been any political will to. There likely wouldn't have been the political will, though.
(Even today, it's maybe a bit weird that no politicians are saying "Reparations for ex factory workers in the rust belt!". Even Bernie doesn't say that.
Particularly, how do you distinguish between those "want to overturn the donkey cart" and those who "want a safety-net welfare state to some degree as well [as a free market economy]?"
On the one hand it sounds like you are really looking for responses only from out and out Soviet-Style communists and the like, but elsewhere you say that "neither Trump nor Harris is neoliberal" when neither seems to me to be proposing abolishing the market.
Makes it hard to tell whether this is a genuine request for a functional non-market vision of the economy (a fair enquiry I myself have made only to find lacking results), or just another take on the American Chopper meme https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1461671-american-chopper-argument.
I suppose Trump and Harris are still generally neo-liberal, but the difference between Biden, Harris and Trump and previous presidents going back to Carter is that the former are moving away from neoliberalism -- mostly with tariffs and subsidies that destroy international trade.
It's probably more about their economic philosophy than their actions. Trump, Biden and Harris are actively against Adam Smith liberalism whereas every president since Carter has moved in the direction (or spoken generally in favor) of Adam Smith liberalism, aka neo-liberalism. (To be clear, few have shouted "I love Adam Smith", but until Trump nobody has proudly endorsed tariffs as a way to help the US economy. He basically took us back to Depression Era economic theory and Biden and Harris have followed him there.)
Some of those examples are pretty bad. Gas tankers can't afford to wait around long for higher prices. If gas tanker companies were actually good at predicting the direction of gas prices, they could just trade the market, they wouldn't need to operate tankers. (According to the story, the tankers were waiting because there was a glut. That doesn't mean that waiting is a good strategy because they might be wrong about the glut ending in the near future, but a glut means very low prices for consumers so I don't see how this example shows that capitalism is screwing the public.)
Perhaps we should clarify what we mean by "neoliberalism". I see no good alternative to market economy, but the neoliberal belief that "the market cures everything" leads to these bad results, so a good government should work against these (welfare state, anti-trust, etc.).
Granted, the examples aren't always so good, better ones could be found. Similar to the gas tankers: There are also shipping companies who dissolve their warehouses and instead simply leave their goods in the trucks, so they are driven around senselessly, polluting the environment and clogging the roads, because it is cheaper that way.
We live in a world where a single digit number of people own as much as half the world, productivity has become decoupled from wage growth, and democratic institutions are bought up by the rich and powerful; what safety nets still exist seem to be a legacy of a less neoliberal era under perpetual assault from politicians of every stripe except the far left.
I do, in fact, want to expropriate the rich, abolish private (not personal) property, and let the chips fall where they may.
You can get to "a single digit number of people" holding more wealth than the bottom 30-40% of the population, I believe. But by the standard that calculation uses, it only takes one person and that person doesn't have to be at all rich. The catch is to use integrated net wealth of "40% of the world" or whatever.
So, if you live on an island with 4,000 people, and one of them is a rich guy who's a million dollars in debt (but they haven't repo'd his Benz yet, he's still living large on credit), and a hundred working-class families with underwater mortgages and $50,000 net debt (but, again, still have all their stuff and are doing mostly OK), and then 1200 poor people who are living paycheck to paycheck but can claim ~$5k each in clothes, beater cars, petty cash, etc, then the integrated net worth of those 1,301 people is zero. One destitute beggar who just had a quarter dropped in his cup, has more "wealth" than the lowest 32.5% of the population combined.
Presenting that in a way that leads to the reader believing that a handful of oligarchs control half the world's stuff, is fundamentally dishonest in a way I consider equivalent to lying.
Oh, thanks. Yes, I was interpreting this as "half [the total wealth of] the world", not "[the wealth of] half [the people of] the world". This makes a lot more sense now. :-)
I am still searching for a coherent anti-neoliberal position. I have appreciated reading work by the Mises Institute and the Distributist Review, both anti-neoliberal from opposing sides, but non-marxist. I don't believe the happy medium you describe between the market and welfare can continue indefinitely. Tech is going to concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands.
It did. Look at the Highland Clearances; it was no longer profitable for large landowners to have tenant farmers, so they evicted them and turned the small holdings into sheep farming (which needs less labour) or deer for hunting, because renting out shooting during the season to well-off gentlemen (or the newly rich who want to pass for gentlemen) makes more money than having small farmers or farm labourers on the same land.
Those evicted were 'encouraged' to emigrate to Canada, as there wasn't employment elsewhere in Scotland to soak up the now excess labour. Tell me that's not concentrating wealth in fewer hands and I'll laugh at you.
Start laughing. I agree that land has become concentrated in fewer hands throughout history and likely will continue to be, but land isn't the only source of wealth. I know plenty of rich people (they are other renters in my building) who don't own any land. If the whole world gets richer, a single resource like land can fall into fewer hands without others getting poorer. Not claiming that no tenant farmer who got evicted didn't get poorer, but perhaps their families did better down the line than they would have otherwise. Tenant farmers are pretty poor to start with.
There seem to be a fair number of major figures of Western history who held attitudes towards nonwhite people that were horrific by modern standards, but were also very philo-Semitic -- George Washington, Winston Churchill, and Theodore Roosevelt to name a few. Are there any notable historical figures who were like this but in reverse, i.e. usually consistent opponents of racism except for being anti-Semitic?
Muhammed Ali?
Ali (at least during his prime years) was just a black supremacist; he viewed all white people as inherently evil, not only Jews.
Phrase of the day:
“disinterested malevolence”
Context:
https://nypost.com/2024/09/07/us-news/nyc-ceo-claims-bitter-ex-wife-ruined-his-300k-wine-collection-suit/
People really will say anything under torture:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/sep/06/dick-cheney-vote-kamala-harris
I think it’s worth spelling out.
“[Trump] can never be trusted with power again.
As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris,”
Dick Cheney - September 6, 2024
______________________
Cheney knows this isn’t about the left/right, elite/populist, policies of a single election.
It’s about stopping a man who has no respect for, is ignorant of, and is entirely incurious about the rare genius of our sometimes flawed but improvable Republic.
The founders knew there would be rascals and scoundrels and made Constitutional provisions for them. But Trump? James Madison had an amazing mind but I doubt even his imagination could have fathomed such a specimen.
“Kamala Harris will be standing on a riser behind her podium during our debate. That’s cheating!”
Good lord, the man is a complete jackass.
I think a great deal of the problem you're having here is that this is perhaps the seventh or so election that's been an "existential moment" according to the people who say Trump must be stopped, and far too many of them remember 2016-2020 as not being that bad, aside from a global pandemic that was also not that bad, except for all the draconian regulations that were enacted in reaction to it, by the people who say Trump must be stopped.
So, the people who are only mildly annoyed by Trump, rather than existentially annoyed by him, do not trust the latter crowd when they say this is an existential moment. This is in addition to the usual crowd who have been regularly annoyed by Democrats.
So when you repeat points like "existential moment" or "uniquely bad", you are hard to distinguish from someone who just wants a Democrat in the WH so badly that they are willing to say things like that, which means they infer you just want a Democrat in the WH really badly. And they're mostly regularly annoyed by that already.
I appreciate your ‘boy who cried wolf’ point.
I think it’s a shame that people can legitimately point to that hyperbolic take and slough off the fact that Trump was actually the first president in American history to try to circumvent the democratic process.
With the obscenity of 1/6/21 and the campaign to force Pence to recognize false electors this does raise the situation to something much more serious than Dick Cheney = Darth Vader or Mitt is a Mormon who put Seamus on the car roof for a vacation trip.
As I say elsewhere, the Republic will most likely survive a second Trump term. If you take him at his word - I know, you can never really do that - it will be a very ugly 4 years.
I’ll just add that I think you are exaggerating a bit with the 7th election being called existential.
Bob Dole and GHWB were ordinary Republicans, standup guys with records of heroic military service. There might have been a bit of hair on fire rhetoric from both sides in the Clinton era but the heat really didn’t get cranked up until post 9/11 and the Axis of Evil and the Coalition of the Willing rhetoric of Bush\Cheney
I do prefer Democratic policies to Republican and I would have been a bit disappointed if Romney or John McCain had prevailed but I knew they were solid American patriots and wouldn’t have lost any sleep over it.
"I’ll just add that I think you are exaggerating a bit with the 7th election being called existential."
2024, 2020, 2016, 2012, 2008, 2004, 2000. That's seven. If I squint, I can see how 2000 wasn't quite as bad, because it was the last election we had with 9/11 in our rearview, and that changed a lot. But it didn't keep Gore from admonishing the nation about what would happen to social security and the budget surplus.
I prefer Republican policies to Democrat (particularly on the economy and gun rights), but I wasn't terrifically bothered by Biden winning over Trump, on the premise that Biden was physically hale and I remember him being willing to send praise across the aisle - until I found he wasn't. But while I do know of a few Democrat voters who, like you, were okay with Romney or McCain, I noticed dramatically more Democratic rhetoric claiming they were going to wreck the nation.
Okay. My mistake to just count presidential elections.
I can’t remember the specifics of Gore’s pitch in 2000 but going into that election as a Dem I expected Bush W to be a pretty moderate Republican - compassionate conservatism and all - until after 9/11.
Well, suppose I amend my paragraph above:
"I think a great deal of the problem you're having here is that this is perhaps the sixth or so election that's been an "existential moment" according to the people who say Trump must be stopped, and far too many of them remember 2016-2020 as not being that bad, aside from a global pandemic that was also not that bad, except for all the draconian regulations that were enacted in reaction to it, by the people who say Trump must be stopped."
Does it appear critically different from the original version?
I made a couple edits for clarity above just now. I had tapped out the comment on my phone while cooling down (sweating profusely) from a bike ride and made the typical two thumbs mistakes.
I'm sure James Madison had heard of Julius Caesar. He's a pretty famous guy.
Yeah they had the guy who conquered the Gauls top of mind when they set things up, not the gasbag star of Celebrity Apprentice. That’s where we get into the realm of ‘difficult to imagine.’
I think "President who wants to declare himself King" would have been well within Madison's imagination. And the system he and his colleagues designed seems to have worked well enough to stop Trump once.
Where does "President who wants to declare himself King" come from? I have seen no indications of that, and it seems rather unlikely for a 78-year-old.
Barely; and the fact that a lot of people are willing to give him another crack at it is sobering.
And it isn’t even that he wanted to declare himself a king. That’s the least of it. The worst of it is that he wanted to make himself a king, but by having us all swallow what was obviously an enormous lie.
I try very hard to remain dispassionate, but it’s challenging sometimes.
This is a man who waged an intense and persistent campaign to get several young black teenagers executed (he agitated for NY to reinstate capital punishment specifically so it could be applied to these boys) for a crime that had been thoroughly proven to have been committed by someone else. And when he grew tired of that decided to get on board with the proposition that Barack Obama‘s birth certificate was a forgery. Plus all the other stuff….
Is it worth it? Quite a few of us seem to think it is.. can you ride the tiger?
I don’t know.
Yes the system they designed held against a first attempt.
In a sane world the first attempt would disqualify him from a second. At least that’s what I think Madison would have hoped for. The Legislative branch is responsible for checking Executive corruption.
Mitch McConnell - March 13, 2021
“There’s no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day. No question about it. The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president.
The leader of the free world cannot spend weeks thundering that shadowy forces are stealing our country and then feign surprise when people believe him and do reckless things.”
Mitch McConnell - March 6, 2024
“It is abundantly clear that former President Trump has earned the requisite support of Republican voters to be our nominee for President of the United States. It should come as no surprise that as nominee, he will have my support.”
No, I have to disagree here. I don’t think Madison would have been able to imagine this. A single man using his superpower of utter shamelessness to bend one of the only two major political parties almost completely to his petulant will. Casting out legislators who refuse to kiss the ring. Those with the strength of character to say that in fact 2 + 2 does not equal 5.
Romney, Cheney, Kinzinger for example. Ryan’s exit was probably caused by Trump as well.
The Republic would more than likely make it through a second Trump presidency intact but it would be a civically corrosive affair and likely a very bumpy ride.
A campaign promise from Donald Trump:
“CEASE & DESIST: I, together with many Attorneys and Legal Scholars, am watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election. It was a Disgrace to our Nation! Therefore, the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again. We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”
I know, he just says these things to be provocative, and I’m a fool to take it too seriously
Trump’s AG, William Barr testified that he told Trump that the stolen election ideas being tossed around were ‘all bullshit’ - his exact words - shortly before being fired.
Fired for having the strength of character to say that in fact 2 + 2 does not equal 5.
I expect a future Trump appointed Attorney General would be vetted for a more compliant nature.
Oh yes. I know. The last line of my previous post was sarcasm in case it was missed.
Thanks for the replies. So I'm mostly with you both on Trump but possibly not with you on Cheney? I can't imagine a worse endorsement and if Cheney really wants Kamala to win he should have kept his mouth shut.
I’ll let Bernie Sanders explain why I think this was worth pointing out.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders - 9/8/24
“What I think Dick and Liz Cheney are saying is that in this existential moment in American history, it’s not just issues. Cheney and I agree on nothing — no issues. But what we do believe in is that the United States should retain its democratic foundations.
I applaud the Cheneys for their courage in defending democracy. Obviously, on all the issues we have very different points of view.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/08/bernie-sanders-dick-cheney-donald-trump-00177884
No amount of class from Bernie will make me like Cheney and I don't think I'll be alone there. There is an anti-war component to Trump's support (recent endorsement from Tulsi Gabbard etc.) and this plays into his hands.
Yeah, we definitely need a sarcasm font.
*Gosh, why would anyone value long-term process over short-term outcomes?*
:-)
Thanks for this
I saw "Alien Romulus" and have a few ideas/criticisms that I'd like feedback on. SPOILER ALERT...
1) The idea that they were able to find the xenomorph's carcass floating in the vastness of space is ridiculous and seemed like a cheap trick.
2) But embracing that plot convenience anyway just leads to another problem: when the cloned xenomorphs got loose on the space station and it ended up disabled thanks to the ruckus, why didn't Weyland-Yutani immediately send a rescue ship? Wasn't the Romulus/Remus space station playing host to perhaps their most important and valuable secret? It wouldn't make sense for them to lose track of it like they did.
3) That makes me think the movie's plot would have been better if Romulus/Remus had been a secret space station in a restricted area of that solar system. Normally, its communications traffic would be very low so it could keep a low profile. However, once the catastrophe happened, it started issuing an automatic distress beacon.
Instead of working on that hellish planet, the protagonists would have been meteoroid miners on that small, industrial ship. Normally, they steered clear of the space station, but after hearing the distress beacon, they decide to risk docking with it to steal whatever they can in the hopes of escaping impoverishment. They assume an accident has killed the crew but left any number of valuable components intact.
A more distant Weyland-Yutani military outpost would also receive the distress beacon, and would dispatch a team on a second space ship to the station. This would ratchet up the tension since the protagonists would have to get in and out of the station before the squad arrived, and it would set both groups up for a showdown late in the film.
4) Another thing I disliked was how quickly the facehugger/xenomorph lifecycle went in this film. Yes, I realize many liberties can be taken here since alien biology is unknown to us, but I also think the alien matured so fast that it probably violated the laws of physics (probably the law of conservation of mass). Growing from the size of a rattlesnake to the size of a large man means adding 200 lbs of mass to your body. Even if your metabolism is 100% efficient, that means consuming 200 lbs of food or somehow transforming 200 lbs worth of air into body mass (1 cubic meter of air is only 2.85 lbs), and we never see any indication the alien does that. (Kudos to the novelization of the original "Alien" movie for including a brief scene after the chestburster scene where the crew discovers their food pantry room has been ransacked.)
It would have been better if the protagonists had docked with the space station at least 24 hours after it had been disabled. That would have provided enough time, per what we saw in the first and third films, for chestbursters who emerged from the station's crew to have matured into adult aliens.
5) Why were the pulse rifles in "Alien Romulus" more advanced than the ones in "Aliens"? The latter takes place 30 years after the former, so why would weapons technology go backwards?
LLMs have all but snuffed out the poetry of scam dating site emails.
A couple years ago with ChatGPT’s arrival, gems like the following disappeared from my junk folder like buffalo from the plains and sadly I don’t think we’ll ever see writing like it again:
Subject: Looking for a someone to have sex-related gender along with
I am actually a charming that is hopeless and try to strongly believe that there is something great in every person. When I'm feeling harmed, I'm sincere about my desires and also am truthful. I'm seeking an every bit as good friend who levels to brand new traits and is actually an outstanding and also unbiased communicator.
Check out my bio.
What a beguiling mix of optimism, vulnerability and sexual adjacency. Was I the only one who collected these? (Probably yes)
Just a few years ago (2020), I often saw Google Translate do translations about that bad, sometimes to the point of being funny. Sadly, it has now improved enough that they are no longer funny (still doesn't hold a candle to LLM based translation though, apart from the fact that it doesn't hallucinate or skip things like LLMs sometimes do).
Yes, improvements to Google Translate probably better explain the sudden disappearance of such emails than LLM adoption.
As an aside, the email would actually serve as strangely appropriate (and grammatically consistent) correspondence from E.E. Cummings’ title character anyone in his famous “anyone lived in a pretty how town.”
"Sex-related gender" is certainly a novel phrase 😀 Next time you're in some discussion about gender matters, try lobbing it in as "oh yes, this is what all the cool kids are using now, didn't you know?" 😁
It actually kinda makes sense. There are thousands of genders, two of them are sex-related, the remaining ones are a matter of self-identification.
I'm reading How To Win Friends and Influence People and did a double take when I came across a story about a company trying to hire a "P.H.D. in Computer Science". This is a book written in *1936*. I know that before electrical computers were invented, the term referred to teams of people who did rote calculations by hand, but even so, I can't imagine that there would have been such a thing as "computer science" back then, let alone one worthy of PHDs. I wish I knew what this was referring to and what "computer science" PHDs did in the 30s.
The edition I'm reading was apparently published in 2009, and so it's possible that they sneakily edited in a later story. But it's still surprising since the book is packed full of references to the 30s, and this is the first time I've seen any reference to anything after that. Why would they so clumsily insert a modern story, and then do it in only one place and nowhere else?!
I’m enjoying the attempts in these comments to argue that a reference to a PhD in computer science in the 1930s is a plausible. Curious to see how they’ll explain the Stevie Wonder reference in a later chapter!
(Indeed, more modern anecdotes were added in later editions.)
Oh you're right, I didn't even pick up on the Stevie Wonder thing. I did notice a reference to Disney World in a later chapter, as well as an entire chapter talking about TV ads, and another one talking about BF Skinner including quotes from 70s books. It's a real shame they inserted all the more modern stuff, because I think it detracts from the book, and the TV ad chapter is completely incoherent anyway.
There were edits like that in the later editions of HtWFaIP; it's been long enough that I don't recall any examples offhand, but I definitely remember noticing them then.
And my father had to get his Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering, because Cornell didn't have a Comp Sci department in 1960. But the NE department had the best computers, so he became the man for doing neutron transport calculations in a submarine reactor (I think). And later taught graduate Computer Science.
So, while "Computer" was certainly a term in 1930 and might have wound up in the same sentence as "Science", I'm pretty sure nobody doing popular writing in that era would have talked about a "Ph.D. in Computer Science".
A lot of academic computer science in those days was more like a branch of mathematics than engineering, dealing with stuff like defining mathematically rigorous abstract models of computation and figuring out what sorts of problems you could solve with one model or another. Both Turing Machines and Alonzo Church's Lambda Calculus were first proposed in 1936, for example.
Could it have been a later updated edition? I read the book years ago and don’t recall that part.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science
Okay, so it looks like punchcards were "computer science" from 1890 to the 1940s, but the first Computer Science Doctoral program wasn't started until 1962. So the question is now whether "a PhD in Computer Science" could be loose terminology for the fields involving punchcards or other calculations (like looking for a PhD in Secretary)..
ChatGPT says that the first PhD in Computer Science was in 1965, Richard Wexelblat at University of Pennsylvania, dissertation title "A Bound on the Number of States in a One-Dimensional Iterative Automaton". Previously, computer science research was done as a part of mathematics, electrical engineering, or physics.
Holy shit, deer are creepy!
At least at night, when wearing a headlamp. I look over and see pairs of glowing yellow eyes silently staring at me from shadowy forms, bobbing and blinking in an inhuman manner.
‘Shining’ deer with car headlights is an old poaching technique.
Just wait till you see what a goose's tongue looks like.
Tech tip of the day. You know when you try to get on public WiFi, but can’t get the “Accept Terms and Conditions” page to show up to actually join? That’s because the network is getting tripped up with encryption. What almost always works is visiting an unencrypted site that uses http (not https) but they’re pretty hard to find these days for good reason.
Anyways, visiting http://neverssl.com does the trick. It’s a site that’s not encrypted, specifically for that purpose. Happy browsing!
Another good try is nmcheck.gnome.org . It's used by default in Ubuntu to redirect you to the captive portal, but I've used it on other computer and even my phone when the page didn't want to load otherwise.
I used to use tvtropes for that purpose but that's on https now. Thanks for the tip!
Review of the fourth episode of the Rings of Power.
It's better, in that things happen and it moves more quickly. We don't get Numenor, Cirdan, Celebrimbor, Annatar, or the Dwarves; it's mostly in Rhun and switching back and forth between there, Elrond and Galadriel heading out to Eregion, and Isildur and company wandering around doing something (I honestly have no idea what they were trying to achieve there).
So at least by sticking to only three concurrent sub-plots it's less messy. Still a little boring, however.
Let's get through this one by one. I'm going to cover each sub-plot as one block, rather than skipping back and forth as the episode does:
(1) Elrond and Galadriel go off on an expedition to Eregion because they've heard nothing from Celebrimbor and Gil-galad is concerned. Galadriel has the wind taken out of her sails because Elrond is given command of the expedition and she's under his command. She is still a bitch about things, Elrond is getting sassy (he's also growing out his hair and it's at the curly locks stage). Maybe with Elves it's the same as with Samson! All their strength is in their hair! Now that his hair is growing back, Elrond has found the cojones to stand up to Girlboss Glads and tell her, more or less, "my way or the highway". Which she does not appreciate, hence the bitchiness and passive-aggression. She is also way paranoid (the wind blows? it's Sauron doing it!) which may or may not be justified. Anyhow,. they head off over the Axa bridge (which made me laugh because over here AXA is an insurance company - product placement or just unfortunate coincidence?) but when they get to the bridge, OH NO IT BROKED!
Elrond says it looks like it was hit by lightning, Galadriel demurs and says it must have been Sauron because no earthly force could do this. They now have a choice of two alternative routes: go north, add two weeks to travel time, or go south through (cue ominous music) Tyrn Gorthad. Galadriel gets a ring vision and says there is evil there, but Elrond distrusts her ring and says that's where we're going.
Galadriel is right because Tyrn Gorthad means the Barrow-downs. But this is a thousand or so years too early for the barrows and the barrow-wights, you say? Remember, this show don't need no stinkin' timelines. So yeah, they go south and yeah, they encounter barrow wights and yeah, one of the group of Diverse Elves bites the dirt (there's a red-haired elf I thought would be the one because he's one of the two white guys, not counting Elrond, but no, they killed off the black Elf. How racist!)
Then they run into some Orcs and the dark-haired white Elf gets an arrow in the abdomen, and while they're all huddled behind a fallen tree trying to muffle his cries so the Orcs don't track them by sound, Galadriel has her hands on him and the riing magically activates and magically heals him. It even makes the arrow magically fall out of him instead of them having to pull it out. How convenient!
The healing makes no sense because that's not one of Nenya's stated powers, but if the show needs magic healing, then it gets magic healing. Galadriel hands the ring to Elrond and tells him and the survivors to get out of Dodge while she distracts the Orcs. She goes off and girlbosses the bunch of Orcs and the other Elves pause to appreciate how she sacrificed herself for them, but Elrond says in the neo-Sindarin (according to the subtitles) no, she did it to save the ring, then he stomps off. Told ya he was getting sassy.
Anyway, this is the bit I fast-forwarded through, as Galadriel girlbosses the Orcs with twirls and skips and flaming arrows and what-not, but just as she is about to ride off (I don't remember where the horse came from), she stops a moment too long to lecture them, so Adar captures her.
I liked that bit, mainly because as he knocks her off the horse via chain (yeah, the Orcs had hooks on chains or maces on chains or something), she aims a flaming arrow at him and he quenches it with his one gauntleted hand and we get the best moment in this episode because it is canon undiluted, genuine Quenya from Tolkien: "Elen síla lúmenn’ omentielvo, heruni Alatáriel". End of episode and a good place to end! Though I wish Joseph Mawle were still playing Adar, Sam Hazeldine is okay but he doesn't have that 'something' Mawle had.
(2) The Stranger and the Harfoots in Rhun. Oh gosh, I dislike this sub-plot *so* much. Let's grit our teeth and power on through, though. The Stranger and the Harfoots have been separated. Stranger goes looking for them, manages to stumble across Tom Bombadil, who has a nice little green patch of land and animals in the middle of the desert. A gust of wind (conveniently) blows the map out of Stranger's hands while he's talking to Bombadil, he chases it, it gets impaled on a tree branch, while Stranger is trying to get it back, the tree swallows him up.
Tom eventually comes along to coax Old Man Willow - sorry, it's Old Man Ironwood this time (hold on a second while I have a little weep about the paucity of imagination in this show) - to let Stranger go, takes Stranger home with him, gives him a bath (where all this spare water in the middle of the desert is coming from is never explained), he sings (yes of course he does) and Stranger thinks he hears a woman (Goldberry) but Tom plays coy and says there's only him and the Stranger there.
Anyway, we get the whole "with great power comes great responsibility" speech from Tom as he persuades Stranger that "you're a wizard, Gandalf!" and that it's his job to fight the Dark Wizard who may be allying with Sauron (there's a fire metaphor used here but I'm not going to inflict it on you). Bombadil is 'the Hermit', you see, and many moons ago the Dark Wizard also ate honey by Tom's fire (this episode abounds in the kind of unintended double entendres where you can easily visualise the porn movie version) and wanted to know about harnessing magic, too. But now he controls a lot of Rhun and wants to control more, he's ambitious you see, and if he links up with Sauron then it'll be bad news. They seem to be hinting damn hard the Dark Wizard is Saruman, but who knows?
So much for Stranger and Bombadil, on to the Harfoots. Oh, but before I do - turns out the Tusken raiders hunting the Stranger and the Harfoots are called Gaudrim. Name meaning unsure; "-rim" is the general suffix for "people, folk" and online source claims that "gau(d)" translates as "device or machine". If that means "People of the Device/Machine", and they're subservient to the Dark Wizard, it could be another hint that he is Saruman (who was the most interested in machinery).
As for their personal names, they seem to be taken from an IKEA catalogue: Glüg and Brânk? Dark Wizard realises this bunch are not really the smartest henchmen in the roster but since they're all he's got so far, he tells them to concentrate on finding the Harfoots and he'll deal with the Istar himself.
The Harfoots (Nori and Poppy) meet a Stoor in the desert, and immediately he and Poppy start making googly eyes at each other. Nori is no more impressed by this budding romance than I am, and they make the Stoor take them back to his village. Poppy and Nori are very surprised by the village life and Harfoots, I mean Stoors, living in holes because it's so alien to their traditions. Turns out the Stoors really are like the Harfoots, as the leader, Gundabale somebody or other, decides to tie up Poppy, Nori and Merimac (the guy who brought them back to the village) and in the morning kick them out into the desert, where she knows the Gaudrim are hunting them. Just like our Harfoot psychopaths would do! The family resemblance is unmistakable!
In fact, Nori says as much, that if Sadoc were in the leader's place, he would have done the same. Once Gundabale learns the name Sadoc Burrows, she takes Nori off for a small history lesson. Turns out that many moons ago, a Stoor named Roderic Burrows had visions of a place with streams of cold water, a place he called the Sûzat (another real Tolkien word, this will one day be the Shire). He set off with a caravan of followers to find it and promised to come back and lead the rest of the Stoors there.
Is that where the Harfoots are from, and have Poppy and Nori come to lead them there? Alas, Nori bursts the bubble that they have no home, they just kept wandering, and Burrows never found the Sûzat. I suppose if there ever is a season three, they'll give us the Fallowhides who *did* find it and settle there.
Okay, so now some of the Gaudrim turn up in the Stoor village looking for the Harfoots; Gundabale pretends she doesn't know about them, but the lead Gaudrim threatens her that unless she hands them over, he'll come back with the Dark Wizard and then the Stoors will learn why the Gaudrim all wear masks (because of the curse which they wanted the wizard to remove last episode, presumably). End of sub-plot so far!
(3) Theo, Arondir, Isildur, Estrid (Isildur's potential love interest) and the surviving Southlanders hanging out in the ruins of Pelargir (which, again, is all kinds of messed-up because it shouldn't be in ruins yet *or* be an abandoned colony of Numenor but by now I should know better than to expect fidelity to lore). A lot happens and yet nothing happens, and I'm not really clear on what is supposed to be going on here. This is the part where I fast-forwarded the most.
Theo manages to get himself captured, Isildur and the gang go searching for him, there's something about Wildmen (I swear on my life they're copying Game of Thrones here because of the coincidence of Wildmen of Dunland), Arondir finds out Estrid is one of the Wildings and wants to use her to find their base, yadda yadda yadda, there's another pointless monster in a mucky bog, they find Theo, an Ent and Entwife turn up and wreck the joint, Arondir speaks to them in Sindarin and there's more yadda yadda yadda and that's about it. I don't know what the point of all of this was.
Roll end credits with Bombadil's song playing, which at least is better than the original lyrics of a part of a song they used in the episode. They used "gropin'" to rhyme with "hoping", you see what I mean about the easily visualised porn version? EDIT: Whoops, got that one wrong; I rewatched to see if I had it correct and no. The actual lyrics, sung by Tom while we get to see Not-Yet-Gandalf from the waist up naked in the tub having a bath, are: "Down sinks the sun in the west/Soon you'll be gropin'" to rhyme with "open" in the next couplet. However, nekkid wizard and "groping" in conjunction = in front of my salad?
Summing up: better pacing, more movement forward. They should have stuck to cutting down number of "and now this happens here and that is going on there and over yonder another thing" in the first three episodes, maybe give one episode to each sub-plot so it could be more fully developed.
The scenery is the best part of this show, even if they over-CGI it. Elrond at least seems to be growing a pair now that he's dealing with Galadriel, though they seem to be introducing pointless CONFLICT CONFLICT CONFLICT for dramatic tension between the pair of them; if Galadriel is too paranoid and stubborn about "everything is Sauron", Elrond is being too stubborn about "the rings are evil and you're wrong to use them".
I want to see what happens next with Adar and Galadriel, even though I do think - so far - Hazeldine is not able to deliver in the part. This episode was better than the preceding three, but the Isildur sub-plot is really just spinning its wheels. We *know* he can't die, so there's no suspense at all in such scenes as "oh no, a bog monster! oh no, Orcs!"
The ACX dating discourse is a bit toxic ...but on the other hand, interesting... possibly my mental model of people's motives is really wrong, here.
I can't think of a topic more likely to stir the passions. On some level I feel the idea the discourse should take place calmly is based on a flawed anthropology. Zeal is an effect of love. I think the alpha discussion below is great.
I just wish the rationalsphere had more dating advice for women, and not just for (straight) men.
Well theres a lot more men than women around, so dating advice is less about "how to get a man" and more "PSA you can get away with really high standards even if you were an ugly duckling in highschool". I think theres a fair bit of that, just its not usually framed as dating advice, more "Ugh I cant believe this dude was *so horrible* to me".
I think a part of the reason is generally fewer women in the rationalsphere, but another part is that the mainstream advice for women sucks less than the mainstream advice for men, so there was less pressure to develop an alternative knowledge base.
What I mean is that e.g. the book "The Rules" is more or less mainstream advice in a condensed form, but anything analogical written for men would be decried as toxic and sexist. The mainstream dating advice for women seems to be unapologetically about "what should he do for you, and how to make him do it", while the mainstream dating advice for men seems to me about "what should you do for her" (spoiler: "women are mysterious, always be polite and buy her flowers").
So I guess a good starting place for a rational advice for women might be to review "The Rules" (maybe as a part of ACX book reviews). I am not the target audience, but I would love to read it out of curiosity.
On the other hand, the fact that mainstream not-obviously-stupid advice for women exists, doesn't imply that the advice is actually good. It probably also follows some taboos, and optimizes for what the audience wants to hear rather than what is true. It is a better starting point, but still just a starting point that needs to be reviewed carefully.
It also depends on what is your goal. For a typical man who reads about dating advice, the goal is "getting laid, preferably with hotter women". From epistemic perspective, this is convenient, because you can try many things and get a quick feedback on what works. (There is a problem with placebo effect, namely that if you try X and succeed, maybe it really was X, and maybe it was just your greater confidence.) With things that have longer feedback loops, like a happy long-term relationship, here even the famous PUAs often fail. I believe that still makes the advice useful, because although short-term success does not imply long-term success, short-term failure means that you don't get a chance for anything long-term. Useful, but incomplete.
What would be the measurable short-term goals for a women's PUA camp?
If I tried to give some advice to straight women, here are some random things:
* The fact that a man wants to have one-night sex with you is very tiny evidence for him wanting to also have a long-term relationship with you (regardless of what he says, because that's probably just instrumental to getting the one-night sex). Similarly, if your photo on social media gets hundreds of likes, it only means you have boobs. I am not judging anyone for wanting one-night sex, I just say to keep firmly in mind that it does *not* imply anything else.
* If you initially don't like a guy, but your best friend insists that he is awesome and you should definitely date him, and keeps pressuring you until you give the guy a chance... don't be surprised if a few months or years later you find out that he is cheating on you with your best friend. You already had enough evidence that she wanted him, and maybe your intuition also tried to tell you something important.
* While it is technically true that you can still get pregnant at 40, consider two things. First, it will limit *how many* children you can have, especially if you change your mind later. For example, if you think that two kids are optimal, and ten years later you decide that actually maybe three... you can still do that if you started in your 20s, but not if you started in your 40s. Second, if you start looking for a reliable partner when you are 40, the best ones were already taken long ago, and the remaining ones probably have some baggage *and* you will have to compete for them against women ten years younger. If you and your partner agreed that you will first spend a decade together without kids, and have kids later, remember that he still has an option to replace you by a younger woman when he finally decides that it's time for him to have kids.
But this is more like long-term strategic considerations, while you probably want specific tactical advice for how (and whether) to get the man in front of you right now.
I might check out "The Rules", thanks for that! Regarding your bullets:
* The ONS thing, yea, I figured that one out experimentally by now.
* The best friend thing: I dunno if it's a real thing, but I'm poly anyway. I don't mind sharing a guy with my best friend :)
* Your last point is not relevant for me since I'm already over 40, and not interested in having additional children.
* Tactical advice: yes please, that would be great.
"The fact that a man wants to have one-night sex with you is very tiny evidence for him wanting to also have a long-term relationship with you (regardless of what he says, because that's probably just instrumental to getting the one-night sex). Similarly, if your photo on social media gets hundreds of likes, it only means you have boobs. I am not judging anyone for wanting one-night sex, I just say to keep firmly in mind that it does *not* imply anything else."
That this is advice that you feel should be given suggests that it is not currently being given, which surprises me. Maybe it's just that I'm from an older generation where we were warned "men only want one thing", or that I'm not in my 20s anymore so yeah it should be self-evident that if you're (say) cohabiting for eight years and he hasn't proposed yet, it is *not* going to happen even if right now you feel ready for wedding bells and kids.
Not condemning men for their biology, but yeah. You have boobs and are not actively repellant, he wants to bang, but after he gets into your knickers? To quote Shakespeare and Sonnet 129:
Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,
Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so,
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
> That this is advice that you feel should be given suggests that it is not currently being given, which surprises me.
It is the kind of advice that needs to be repeated at least 100 times, because the first 99 times people are likely to miss it. Probably everyone heard it, but also everyone believes that "this one situation is special".
> it should be self-evident that if you're (say) cohabiting for eight years and he hasn't proposed yet, it is *not* going to happen
The easiest way to waste eight years is one day at a time. And it's eight years of hearing "definitely yes, but not right now", and sometimes there are plausible excuses. And the woman may also kinda want it, but also procrastinate on it. Setting deadlines means making hard decisions, and most people avoid that.
And the part that age matters is actively denied in current culture. We are all forever young, and damn any sexist who claims otherwise.
Is the "best friend insisting a guy is awesome" situation some kind of known thing that commonly happens?
I don't really get what the motivation would be for the best friend, if they want them themselves how does pushing them on someone else help?
Two women independently told me that it happened to them. I have never read about anything like that online or in media. So either this is a rare situation that just accidentally happened twice in my bubble, or it is a frequent situation and there is some taboo against mentioning it. I have no data to prove either way.
(The hypothetical taboo would be that most advice for women comes from women and is given in the spirit of "we sisters need to trust and support each other". This situation suggests the opposite. The mainstream advice for women is allowed to be cynical about men, less so about other women, and especially not about friends.)
For the record, I think it is on average *good* for women to trust each other's advice, but I think the most value here comes from your friend noticing a red flag that you missed.
> I don't really get what the motivation would be for the best friend, if they want them themselves how does pushing them on someone else help?
The situation is that the best friend already tried to get the guy for herself, but she failed. (She probably didn't disclose this detail to you.) Now if the guy is hot, he will soon get some girl. If it's you, at least he stays in her proximity, so she can try again later... and as your friend she will probably have a lot of seemingly innocent opportunity to meet him. If instead it is some strange girl, he might disappear out of her life completely.
That's fascinating. It's interesting how there are things like this that are counterintuitive at first glance, but make sense once explained. And also interesting to learn that people behave like this.
I wish there was an AI tool for people on autistic spectrum that would observe the social situation around them and then quietly explain it using plain words.
Sometimes the understanding is hard not because the correct explanation is complex, but because this is not something *I* would ever do, so the right hypothesis doesn't even occur to me. Once someone points in the right direction, it suddenly becomes obvious.
Perhaps there are some simple heuristics such that if you memorize them and remember to apply them to all confusing situations, they could actually explain a lot of them. Such as: "Consider the possibility that the person is lying to you. Try to think of three different explanations why making you believe X could be useful for them."
I don't know about advice, but I am enjoying reading different views from the ladies in the alpha discussion.
Russians continue to interfere with US elections.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-justice-department-election-foreign-influence-4888f4bfc61e46173101060ad0321d2f
One of the most frustrating things about the feckless Western leaders of this century is their continued refusal to wake up to the reality of Russia’s intentions. All these bushes, obamas, merkels, sarkozys, etc. and up to the current crop of nincompoops - clueless dolts still looking for Putin’s soul while being scared of his shadow.
I believe Putin's soul can be found at: https://youtu.be/YbckvO7VYxk
But unlike Londo Mollari, I don't think Putin will get a redemption arc in the last season.
Nah. Everything one needs to know about Putin can be learned in 10 seconds right here: https://youtu.be/dqDqvKYDv9M?feature=shared&t=5
Sounds plausible! To give the devil his due, losing an empire is not a fun experience...
Other than maybe sort-of kind-of the British, has any empire relinquished power gracefully?
The historic Soviet Empire and the fictional Centauri one both relinquished power gracefully, right up to the point where some tragically damned revanchist decided he wanted it all back the way that it was.
Many Thanks! Yeah, I don't recall anything particularly bloody happening when all the *stans split off the former USSR... Good point! ( I can't comment about the Centauri case - didn't watch the relevant TV :-) )
<mildSnark>
Did the fission of the USSR count as the political equivalent of a spallation reaction? :-)
</mildSnark>
Sauce for the goose.
Sorry, is the principle here just might makes right? Is the legitimacy of democratic institutions valueless?
> Sorry, is the principle here just might makes right?
I think Americans who argue that they can interfere in other countries without any reverse interference are the ones arguing that position. I’m not. I’m saying “sh1t goes on”.
Also I doubt the Russian interference stories in specific, we were all a bit burned by Russia gate.
I don't see anyone here actually arguing that position though?
One could believe that Russia, Iran, and China interfering with democracy in America is bad, and also America interfering with democracy in Argentina or Colombia is also bad.
What's better than neo-liberalism? A free-market economy makes nearly everyone better off in the long run because trade and innovation are maximized. Most people want a safety-welfare net to some degree as well, and it seems we can have it both ways, both relatively free markets but also a welfare state to a degree, a degree we can always argue about endlessly.
For those who want to overturn the donkey-cart, what do you think is better than neo-liberalism and why?
I read Freddie DeBoer and try to understand his Marxism sometimes. I read him because he is a great writer of English prose, but he's horrible about explaining his Marxism. Recently he wrote that (I'm paraphrasing) his Marxism is rooted in the exploitation of the worker by capital. (He is apparently against it.)
Exploitation means "to get value out of", and I don't see why that's a bad thing, but I intuit that those who use exploitations in a bad sense mean that something negative has happened to the worker in order to squeeze the value out of them, a dramatic example being a pimp forcing a hooker to sell her body for money even though she would prefer not to were her situation just slightly better.
And most all of us are like that hooker from time to time on our jobs metaphorically to some degree usually much less.
Marx also says we are alienated from our work. I agree entirely, although, again, it's a matter of degree and varies a lot. Plenty of people feel right at home at work despite the capitalist system and all. But some of us just work for a paycheck and don't identify with our jobs.
It drives me crazy that modern-day Marxists seem unwilling to describe a toy version of what the world might look like under Communism. How would our work change? Please illustrate the differences in significant detail. Feel free to speculate and idealize. Or to speculate and pragmatize.
Communists just seem so intellectually cowardly these days.
However I will admit to an anti-neoliberal point of view I might buy into somewhat if someone could make it coherent. Neoliberals care about economic growth, i.e., the future. But let's say we are willing to sacrifice future economic growth for a near-term present that is better for everyone living in this century. Economics is about tradeoffs. What can we buy for the next 60 years if we trade away future growth for it? It must be something but what? I might be willing to make that Faustian bargain...
I'm not in the donkey-cart flipping business myself, but most of the reasons I've heard have nothing to do with the line of arguments you're pursuing, and rather focus on some utopian or semi-utopian image of a wonderful past or a glorious future that ought to implemented.
I haven't heard any serious challenges to the neoliberal state you describe. Some idea-trees, like degrowth, try to masquerade as such, but as soon as you scratch the surface you find only vibes and no serious policy proposals or institution design.
"A free-market economy makes nearly everyone better off in the long run because trade and innovation are maximized."
Typically anti-neoliberals dispute that, for reason like:
The West grew faster under post-war social democracy than since 1980. China employs a fair amount of state control of the economy and grows fast.
I've got some posts about why I'm sceptical Free Markets are efficient. Probably the most relevant one:
https://claycubeomnibus.substack.com/p/economic-calculation-in-the-rts-commonwealth
Otherwise the only other real response would be that if inequality grows faster than the overall economy the median standard of living can still drop even if the mean is rising.
Also if you want to see an interesting toy model of communist society Towards a New Socialism is probably the most compelling one, it seems like most free-market types shift their opinion on the viability of communism at least a little if they read it.
Thanks.
This substack post makes a decent argument that in the 80s most of the academic Marxists became neo-liberals because when they got down to it they couldn't agree that exploitation of labor was morally wrong, but they could all agree that inequality was wrong. The author even mentions Freddie specifically, writing "nowadays, when kids like Freddie deBoer come along insisting that 'Marxism is not an egalitarian philosophy,' I nod my head in agreement, but I want to respond 'Yes! That’s why nobody is a Marxist any more.'"
https://josephheath.substack.com/p/john-rawls-and-the-death-of-western
They didn’t become neo-liberals but other non Marxist forms of socialism. That’s a good article nevertheless, it at least engages in a critique of Marxism from the left, which is unusual. Largely because most proclaimed Marxists aren’t actually Marxists at all.
I saw that. It's interesting. I saw another post responding and arguing against it, but I didn't read that one.
What confuses me most about Marxists is the History Marxists. I think they mostly believe that history is determined by economics and class struggle and are pretty deterministic overall, but why do they have to call themselves Marxists? (Why do so many people on this site have to call themselves Rationalists?) What else do they believe? For instance, a pretty good historian like Chris Wickham identifies as a Marxist, but I've read a couple of his books and don't see where the Marxism is. It's like reading Freddie. You know he's a Marxist because he says he is, but where's the Marxism in his writing? I can never find it. Or maybe it's just a free pass for him to be against everything.
This seems accurate to my understanding:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxist_historiography#The_effects_of_Marxist_historiography
I honestly don’t think that Freddie has read Marx at all. Most of his writings are anti woke, and sometimes pro left. He’s pro trans but that’s a socially libertarian position.
It’s not unusual for Marxists to not explain the future society except in the vaguest terms, so he’s not alone there. That’s starts with Marx. It’s relatively new for modern Marxists to not use any Marxist terminology at all.
Well, a central part of Marx's theory is that history is determined by economics and class struggle and that using his theory you could predict what will happen in the future. Now nothing he predicted actually happened, but that's just details.
Right. It just seems weird that talented historians go around calling themselves Marxists in 2024. I guess some people just want to belong to a club.
> a pimp forcing a hooker to sell her body for money even though she would prefer not to were her situation just slightly better<
I don’t think this is a good example of what you are getting at. She might just prefer to keep more of what she makes given what value the pimp brings to the table. It’s one thing for capitalism to provide the machinery by which workers can be gainfully employed (or exploited) but a girl’s got that out of the gate; pimping is a protection racket, pure and simple.
Now you've got me thinking about all the things I've heard about pimps and hookers over the years, some of it from their own mouths. At least in the US, where prostitution is illegal almost everywhere, most hookers don't make any money. It all goes to the pimp. You can think of it as an abusive poly relationship. The women are emotionally dependent on the pimp, the pimp gives the women affection but makes them fuck for money they turn over to him. They are a family of sorts.
There are plenty of exceptions to that, of course. But it is not generally a protection racket, at least in the US.
Agree my using it as an example was bad.
I would be curious to hear more about your conversations.
I have had quite a few myself, but context is everything. There are many layers, many possibilities…
The problem is lack of definitions here. You are equating capitalism with neo-liberalism but prior to the 1980s, the term wasn’t used and the neo liberal era is a clear break from the post war era.
You are right about Freddie, no indication that he has really read Marx.
> Exploitation means "to get value out of", and I don't see why that's a bad thing,
Marx was often using the term in the neutral sense.
> but I intuit that those who use exploitations in a bad sense mean that something negative has happened to the worker in order to squeeze the value out of them
Well the bad thing is the “surplus” value that is taken from the worker. Not dissimilar to rent that landlords exploit from peasants. In fact theories about exploitation and unearned income often started with rent - seeking ricardo.
>Well the bad thing is the “surplus” value that is taken from the worker. Not dissimilar to rent that landlords exploit from peasants. In fact theories about exploitation and unearned income often started with rent - seeking ricardo.
How do we measure that surplus? I think most anti-capitalists don't value the risk-taking involved in capitalism. You start a business hoping to get rich, but the odds are you will fail and lose most of your capital. If you are one of the 10% of businesses that succeed, all of your profits are viewed as "rent" by many anti-capitalists. But obviously it isn't rent if you risked losing it all! But if you put it in those terms, few will sympathize with the capitalist because you have just equated them to a gambler, and almost nobody empathizes with gamblers.
Rent-seeking does exist but I'm not very good at identifying it or distinguishing it clearly from risk-taking.
> Rent-seeking does exist but I'm not very good at identifying it or distinguishing it clearly from risk-taking.
There is not necessarily a clear line. Things can be part this and part that.
Let me give you a different example: from the perspective of the "labor | land | capital" trichotomy, talented people (probably most readers of this website) should be considered a combination of "labor" and "land", that is "workers" and "renters" simultaneously. So if we happen to get good salaries, it does not mean that the society is actually nice to workers. It just means that we got lucky to also be part-renters.
Ok, this sounds weird, if you interpret "land" and "rent" literally. But if you look for the reasons behind the "labor | land | capital" trichotomy, you can more generally define "labor" as "that which costs human time and effort", "land" as "that which is in a limited supply", and "capital" as "that which can flexibly move anywhere". And from that perspective, high intelligence or talent kinda resembles the "land" category; there is a limited supply of smart people, and companies have to compete for them, which gives them the leverage. But it also resembles "labor", because the only way the smart person can use the high intelligence to produce results is to work, i.e. also spend time and effort. (You can't simply send your IQ to work alone, while you stay dumb at home and relax.) Thus, from an economical perspective, a smart person is a hybrid of "labor+land"; a worker with a leverage.
Now let's look at the capitalists from this perspective. Venture capitalists are the pure "capital" guys. Those who build startups are "labor+capital" hybrids, because they have to spend a lot of time and work hard to make it succeed. Actually, more like "labor+land+capital" hybrids, because it also requires some rare skills. The categories are not exclusive.
If this was purely about the capital, the capitalist wouldn't mind if others (including the employees) bought a share in the company. Money is fungible. And this is indeed how it works when the company is traded publicly. But many companies are not; and those are the ones where the owner has a leverage, that is the "land" aspect of the business.
> You start a business hoping to get rich, but the odds are you will fail and lose most of your capital.
This is part of the story, but not the whole story. (It is the whole story if you are a venture capitalist.) For example, if you approached most people who are starting a company, and offered to provide them money in return for a share in the company, I suppose many would refuse you. Partially it is because they also provide work, but even if you said "ok, I will pay 60% of the money for 30% of the ownership", they would probably still refuse you. If you proposed to them to make it a cooperative where everyone provides a part of money, they would almost certainly refuse you.
The surplus is easy to measure. Just imagine the company didn’t distribute profits to shareholders but was a partnership of workers. That’s the surplus.
I’m not a Marxist and there are more coherent answers to Marx than your response which isn’t wrong either. Nevertheless falling wage levels relative to the rest of GDP is a problem.
> and almost nobody empathizes with gamblers.
You’re right; we either excoriate or envy them, depending on how they prospered.
Sure, I think there's two deep problems with neoliberalism as it currently exists in the US.
While there's a lot of variability in definitions of neoliberalism, a core component is redistribution and the welfare state. Basically, capitalism is really unfair, we want the state to bleed off some excess profit and give it to poor and middle-income people and that will make everyone happier. The issue is that this has bad externalities that we can't really control. For example, conservatives for a long time have criticized the welfare state for creating dependency among people and for building large, unaccountable bureaucracies. Which is a pretty good description of Medicare and Medicaid. We have large bureaucracies with poorly aligned incentive structures that a lot of elderly people are deeply dependent on for critical services that are so poorly run financially that it's a major drive of US federal debts and deficits in ways that are looking...very concerning for America's long-run financial health.
Secondly, and I think the Marxists are absolutely right on this, commoditization is a very real thing and it's really bad. I'm thinking very specifically of the old SSC review of the "Two Income Trap" (1), where women left the home to enter the workforce and doubled the family income but most of that extra money went towards taxes, child care, tutoring and housing in better school districts, and a 2nd car so she could drive to work. That's not to say that there's no financial advantage to women entering the workforce, just that a lot of that extra money is going to buy explicit substitute goods in the market for things women previously did in the home outside of the market. This greatly overexaggerates the benefits of liberalism and often drives people into making suboptimal decisions. A lot of social interaction in stuff like bowling leagues has been commoditized by things like social media in really harmful ways.
At this point how people define neoliberalism gets really important, because neoliberalism, or at least state redistribution of some of the gains of capitalism, seems to be a convergence point for most modern governments but there's a lot of variance in how that's executed at to what extent. China can seem to be very neoliberal until you dig into how state-owned enterprises actually function.
(1) https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/28/book-review-the-two-income-trap/
I don’t have a great alternative to point to, but the big selling point of neo-liberalism, that we can have maximal trade and innovation while protecting people, has fallen pretty flat.
At this point, I think many people, just just populists, are skeptical about claims that the losses of liberalization can and will be made up in any meaningful way.
I think you're correct. In theory we could have used some of the gains from offshoring to recompense factory workers who lost their jobs due to it. But we don't do that. The problem is that same mindset which says "Global trade is good!" tends to also say "Compensating losers is bad!". I think that global trade is good and compensating our fellow countrymen who lose from it is good, but that seems to be a minority position.
> The problem is that same mindset which says "Global trade is good!" tends to also say "Compensating losers is bad!". I think that global trade is good and compensating our fellow countrymen who lose from it is good, but that seems to be a minority position.
I agree with you... but that's just further evidence that this is a minority position.
I suspect that most people understand "global trade is good" as "good for *me*" rather than "good for *everyone*". Both can be true, but the former is the important part, so if the latter has some exceptions, no one cares (unless they are one of them).
>I think that global trade is good and compensating our fellow countrymen who lose from it is good, but that seems to be a minority position.
I would suggest some caveats to the "global trade is good" part. Yes, autarky is inefficient, but it is also true that supply lines wrapped around the globe are vulnerable. Theoretically, insurance markets could incorporate that vulnerability in prices, but, having seen Covid's effects, I'm not at all convinced that that really works very well. There is something to be said for actively trying to shorten supply lines, at least to lessen some of the worst vulnerabilities.
Yes, but without that you don’t really have “neo” liberalism any more, and you’re causing a lot of damage and anger which will sooner or later find an outlet, see Brexit and President Trump for examples. It’s honestly a big problem.
I think few people were ever actually "neo-liberals" in the sense that it means a market economy with free global trade plus some redistribution of the profits to make things fairer. It's merely been a compromise position for politicians in recent decades. Actual people tend to be either all in on markets or all in on more redistribution. So politicians pretend to stake a middle-ground, but in areas where the market wins, it wins everything. In areas where the government intervenes, the market becomes too distorted to function properly (real estate, education, etc.)
OK, I’m not sure we’re operating from the same understanding of the word, but what I mentioned was the basic neo-liberal “bargain” and was certainly talked up by Clinton et al, and even the Republicans used to talk about rising tides lifting boats etc. People were sold on this plan.
If the plan had been presented as “we’re going to send all your jobs overseas and replace them with delivery gigs and fentanyl”, the pushback would have come a lot sooner.
If we hadn't spent the trillions we got from China (in the form of treasury purchases and the resultant low interest rates) in Iraq and Afghanastan we could have easily afforded to compensate ex factory workers had there been any political will to. There likely wouldn't have been the political will, though.
(Even today, it's maybe a bit weird that no politicians are saying "Reparations for ex factory workers in the rust belt!". Even Bernie doesn't say that.
What is your definition of neoliberal here?
Particularly, how do you distinguish between those "want to overturn the donkey cart" and those who "want a safety-net welfare state to some degree as well [as a free market economy]?"
On the one hand it sounds like you are really looking for responses only from out and out Soviet-Style communists and the like, but elsewhere you say that "neither Trump nor Harris is neoliberal" when neither seems to me to be proposing abolishing the market.
Makes it hard to tell whether this is a genuine request for a functional non-market vision of the economy (a fair enquiry I myself have made only to find lacking results), or just another take on the American Chopper meme https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1461671-american-chopper-argument.
I suppose Trump and Harris are still generally neo-liberal, but the difference between Biden, Harris and Trump and previous presidents going back to Carter is that the former are moving away from neoliberalism -- mostly with tariffs and subsidies that destroy international trade.
It's probably more about their economic philosophy than their actions. Trump, Biden and Harris are actively against Adam Smith liberalism whereas every president since Carter has moved in the direction (or spoken generally in favor) of Adam Smith liberalism, aka neo-liberalism. (To be clear, few have shouted "I love Adam Smith", but until Trump nobody has proudly endorsed tariffs as a way to help the US economy. He basically took us back to Depression Era economic theory and Biden and Harris have followed him there.)
Some problems with neoliberalism:
The Matthew effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect i.e. "the devil craps on the biggest pile", or as Marx would put it, "capital accumulates".
Example: Nvidia has a margin of more than 70% https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financial-results-for-second-quarter-fiscal-2025
Monopolies:
E.g. Amazon https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/amazon-used-market-power-warp-prices-goods-internet-ftc-alleges-rcna117371
Profit-maximising companies will always put in the absolute minimum of work, when they can get away with it.
Example: https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-pxdx-medical-health-insurance-rejection-claims
Ressources are handled suboptimally for capitalist reasons, e.g. gas tankers idling around waiting for higher prices:
https://www.ft.com/content/19ad9f9f-e1cb-40f9-bae3-082e533423ab
Companies go bankrupt at the worst moment.
https://grist.org/housing/louisiana-homeowner-insurance-hurricane-season/
Which of those are you imagining to have been recent inventions? Or to have been more common starting in the 1980s than previously?
Are you saying capitalism is not good because it is not perfectly good?
What's a better alternative?
Some of those examples are pretty bad. Gas tankers can't afford to wait around long for higher prices. If gas tanker companies were actually good at predicting the direction of gas prices, they could just trade the market, they wouldn't need to operate tankers. (According to the story, the tankers were waiting because there was a glut. That doesn't mean that waiting is a good strategy because they might be wrong about the glut ending in the near future, but a glut means very low prices for consumers so I don't see how this example shows that capitalism is screwing the public.)
Perhaps we should clarify what we mean by "neoliberalism". I see no good alternative to market economy, but the neoliberal belief that "the market cures everything" leads to these bad results, so a good government should work against these (welfare state, anti-trust, etc.).
Granted, the examples aren't always so good, better ones could be found. Similar to the gas tankers: There are also shipping companies who dissolve their warehouses and instead simply leave their goods in the trucks, so they are driven around senselessly, polluting the environment and clogging the roads, because it is cheaper that way.
We live in a world where a single digit number of people own as much as half the world, productivity has become decoupled from wage growth, and democratic institutions are bought up by the rich and powerful; what safety nets still exist seem to be a legacy of a less neoliberal era under perpetual assault from politicians of every stripe except the far left.
I do, in fact, want to expropriate the rich, abolish private (not personal) property, and let the chips fall where they may.
> We live in a world where a single digit number of people own as much as half the world
I don't think this is remotely correct?
You can get to "a single digit number of people" holding more wealth than the bottom 30-40% of the population, I believe. But by the standard that calculation uses, it only takes one person and that person doesn't have to be at all rich. The catch is to use integrated net wealth of "40% of the world" or whatever.
So, if you live on an island with 4,000 people, and one of them is a rich guy who's a million dollars in debt (but they haven't repo'd his Benz yet, he's still living large on credit), and a hundred working-class families with underwater mortgages and $50,000 net debt (but, again, still have all their stuff and are doing mostly OK), and then 1200 poor people who are living paycheck to paycheck but can claim ~$5k each in clothes, beater cars, petty cash, etc, then the integrated net worth of those 1,301 people is zero. One destitute beggar who just had a quarter dropped in his cup, has more "wealth" than the lowest 32.5% of the population combined.
Presenting that in a way that leads to the reader believing that a handful of oligarchs control half the world's stuff, is fundamentally dishonest in a way I consider equivalent to lying.
Oh, thanks. Yes, I was interpreting this as "half [the total wealth of] the world", not "[the wealth of] half [the people of] the world". This makes a lot more sense now. :-)
I didn't realize that productivity has become decoupled from wage growth. Do you have some data to point to? I admit that I am skeptical of the claim.
https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
This is the basic overview, but it's been studied for awhile now.
I am still searching for a coherent anti-neoliberal position. I have appreciated reading work by the Mises Institute and the Distributist Review, both anti-neoliberal from opposing sides, but non-marxist. I don't believe the happy medium you describe between the market and welfare can continue indefinitely. Tech is going to concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands.
> Tech is going to concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands.
That’s a fairly good takedown of neo-liberalism (or really capitalism). It’s something that Marx expected.
Why didn't tech concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands before now? Tech is nothing new.
It did. Look at the Highland Clearances; it was no longer profitable for large landowners to have tenant farmers, so they evicted them and turned the small holdings into sheep farming (which needs less labour) or deer for hunting, because renting out shooting during the season to well-off gentlemen (or the newly rich who want to pass for gentlemen) makes more money than having small farmers or farm labourers on the same land.
Those evicted were 'encouraged' to emigrate to Canada, as there wasn't employment elsewhere in Scotland to soak up the now excess labour. Tell me that's not concentrating wealth in fewer hands and I'll laugh at you.
Start laughing. I agree that land has become concentrated in fewer hands throughout history and likely will continue to be, but land isn't the only source of wealth. I know plenty of rich people (they are other renters in my building) who don't own any land. If the whole world gets richer, a single resource like land can fall into fewer hands without others getting poorer. Not claiming that no tenant farmer who got evicted didn't get poorer, but perhaps their families did better down the line than they would have otherwise. Tenant farmers are pretty poor to start with.