Has anyone done an analysis of the brewing tariff war with Canada yet?
I’m very surprised Canada has decided to retaliate dollar for dollar (which Trump has promised to double if they do) rather than negotiate whatever it is that’s actually motivating Trump to do this (explicitly it’s fentanyl and illegal border crossings, but who knows). I suspect he’d want a full reevaluation on specific industry subsidies and tariffs that Canada imposes on the US too.
Perhaps Trump isn’t willing to negotiate at all, which I don’t really buy, but is possible. The retaliation is doing “something” which is obviously demanded by the voters.
Canada is hugely dependent on US trade, and while Canadian tariffs on the US will cause harm, it will equally harm Canadian producers, and probably lead to even more tariffs imposed on them. For a country that has such a huge percent of its GDP tied up in trade with the US, I can’t see anything but a recession for Canada (and a minor decrease in GDP for the US).
All the analysis I’ve found are either saber rattling or what this means for the average consumer. I’m interesting in anyone who’s looking at the macroeconomic effects.
> We pay hundreds of Billions of Dollars to SUBSIDIZE Canada. Why? There is no reason. We don’t need anything they have. We have unlimited Energy, should make our own Cars, and have more Lumber than we can ever use. Without this massive subsidy, Canada ceases to exist as a viable Country. Harsh but true! Therefore, Canada should become our Cherished 51st State. Much lower taxes, and far better military protection for the people of Canada — AND NO TARIFFS!
Now, my own analysis of the situation. I am emphatically NOT going to stick to macroeconomics: I think your attempt to focus so heavily there is misleading you. Canada CANNOT look at this purely as an economic decision because it isn't. So the Canadian response will naturally factor in the economic realities, but also the diplomatic and political realities. Trump has, in an only-just-shy-of-literal-sense declared war on Canada[1] and Canada's response must be a *strategic* response: that is, the one that best serves all of Canada's strategic aims. Of course "maintaining Canada's economy" is obviously a major strategic aim, but so are "preserving Canada's national sovereignty" and "maintaining Canada's diplomatic position with the U.S. and the rest of the world," both of which are threatened by this move just as surely as the economy is.
First Point: negotiations require, well, actual negotiations. As outlined above, Trump doesn't seem to have made any attempt to negotiate with Canada at all. Likewise, Canada already made a quite large an expensive conciliatory move before Trump even took office. The only sense in which Canada could negotiate its way out of this situation is to *keep doing things like this* in the hopes that eventually Trump is satisfied and withdraws the threat. I hope I don't have to outline why this would be a fatally stupid way to operate. If Trump is threatening these tariffs as a way to get something (rather than imposing them because he thinks they're worthwhile in their own right) it's incumbent upon him to *at the bare minimum* ask for what he wants in concrete terms.
Second Point: reputational effects are real and important here. Every country is one player among many on the international state, and every country is on that stage for the long term. The actions you take today in one negotiation will affect the situation you face tomorrow and the next day, in future negotiations. Reputational effects are a very important component to both sides of this conflict. On Canada’s side, caving easily to U.S. pressure will today will lead rational actors to expect Canada to cave in similar fashion tomorrow. This could potentially cost a lot. Not only would Canada’s closest neighbor be made readily aware that in can extract concessions basically any time it wants by threatening Canada’s economy, but it could easily encourage other nations to try the same. This could be very, very costly for Canada in the long run, potentially much more so than the proposed tariffs. By contrast, the harder Canada hits back, the higher the apparent price tag it sets for anyone who wants to try this in the future. Trade wars tend to be enormously negative-sum: the U.S. might be better able to afford the hit, but it will still be a hit, which means the policy is less likely to be long-run profitable for the U.S. and less likely to be repeated.
On the U.S. side, even if Trump were to unilaterally back down on all his tariff threats tomorrow, he’s already damaged the U.S.’s international reputation. Actually imposing such tariffs on Canada will do greater and more lasting damage. The U.S. has remained the preeminent economic and diplomatic power in the world for 80 years in very large part by not doing stuff like this. While the U.S. can be imperious and demanding sometimes, it’s built up a very strong and very valuable reputation for being a good friend to have: it mostly presses the “cooperate” button and surrounds itself with other nations who tend to do the same. Everybody stays at peace, everybody trades reasonably nicely with everybody and as a result everybody gets rich. Short of declaring a shooting war, it’s difficult to imagine an action that U.S. could take that would be more damaging to that carefully-accumulated reputation than wantonly trying to wreck the economy of one of its oldest and closest allies over some comparatively minor domestic problems. Obviously the economic and diplomatic position of the U.S. are still central enough that this one act of aggression–however shocking–won’t trash it overnight. But it’s a crack in the foundation, and not a small one. Enough cracks will bring the house down, and even before then, there will be detrimental effects. This does connect strongly to the macroeconomic angle. Suppose you’re an investor being pitched an opportunity that heavily involves selling goods from abroad in the U.S. You just heard the news of the tariffs. Did that increase your eagerness to invest or decrease it? Even if none of the goods are coming from Canada, these threats are a really sharp demonstration that anyone could be Trump’s next target. All business ventures that require interacting with the U.S. market are suddenly looking a little more volatile than they did a week ago, or three weeks ago or a year ago. Volatility carries risk and hedging against risk costs money. My macroeconomics knowledge isn’t strong enough to estimate how large this effect will be–my guess is that as a one-off it will be lost in the noise–but if things like this keep happening, it's difficult to imagine that it won’t start to impose a real, significant drag on the U.S. economy. A lot of people with significant business connections in the U.S. have got to be evaluating their other options and researching other suppliers and/or consumers right now. And while they’re a little more abstract, I expect diplomatic effects in a similar vein: U.S. guarantees of cooperation and friendship (be they on trade, defense, intelligence or anything else) just got a little more questionable. Negotiators will be a little bit less willing to align with U.S. diplomatic priorities if this is wage that two centuries of steady friendship buys U.S. allies.
Third Point: the internal politics of both countries also real and important factors. Saving the best for last, this is (in my opinion) the factor that I most expect to prove decisive. Certainly a trade war with the U.S. will cause far greater economic damage to Canada–as a fraction of GDP–than it will cause to the U.S. But the political effects will be much, much less lopsided. As far as I can tell[2], the general mood among Canadians right now is that we are under attack, and that we need to stand up and defend ourselves. Meanwhile calling the general mood among those in the U.S. “divided” would be a massive understatement. Tens of millions of Americans were already angry and horrified at the conduct of the new administration before Saturday’s announcement, and this will not make them any calmer or any less determined to push back against the government they oppose. Meanwhile, how many people even among those that voted for Trump actually want him to plunge them into a trade war with Canada? I got the sense that a lot of what secured Trump his win was economic hardship and anxiety. An action that increases prices U.S. consumers pay while hurting a significant share of U.S. businesses (all done in the service of fairly nebulous objectives) seems unlikely to sit well with at least some of those people. To be fair, Trump proved himself both very stubborn and essentially immune to negative news headlines during his first term, but actions that his millions of Americans directly in the pocket book might well be harder for him to shrug off. If the trade war creates solidarity on the Canadian side, while sowing division and galvanizing organized opposition on the U.S. side, it seems very possible that the U.S.’s political will cracks before Canada’s does, despite the lopsided economic impact. If that happens, then the U.S. loses doubly hard: it damages its own economy and reputation without getting anything in return. Trade War: the only winning move is not to play.
[1] Or if you like, announced an intent to declare war, with the actual declaration scheduled for Tuesday.
[2] Which, to be fair, is not all that far. I’ve only had a chance to talk to a few people about it, and they’ve been mostly people whose views align with my own in other ways.
> Suppose you’re an investor being pitched an opportunity that heavily involves selling goods from abroad in the U.S. You just heard the news of the tariffs. Did that increase your eagerness to invest or decrease it?
Well, here's what Trump has to say about that:
> MAKE YOUR PRODUCT IN THE USA AND THERE ARE NO TARIFFS!
My request that you not reply to me was not time or post limited. The intent was that I don't want to talk to you any time, on any post, ever.
This is a great illustration of why. I have neither the patience nor the pedagogical experience to explain to you what political cheerleading doesn't actually map to real-world economic outcomes; the attempt would probably be quite unpleasant for all involved. If you posted your opinions as a reply to the top-level thread, you'd be more likely to find someone able to hand-hold you across the apparently-vast gap in understanding.
...Mate, I was just letting you know what Trump's aims were. Investing in other countries isn't going to be a viable option when the global supply chain is in tatters, so they may as well move operations to the US. And he will burn the whole world down just to make this happen. Did you think "America First" was just a bluff? His ambitions are real, and now he has the power to fulfill them.
I mean, he really really doesn't understand how economy works? Forget the fancy word "economy", how, for example, manufacturing business works, or who it is that pays the tariffs. At this point it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, and it has been doing this for a long time, so an inescapable conclusion is that Trump is a clueless dolt with a sadistic streak.
Does the Dane Geld metaphor fit this scenario with the US as the Danes? Can game theory inform Canada and Mexico's actions? Trump seems like a defect-bot sometimes.
First some facts that you seem to be unaware of. I'll write my own thoughts and opinions about the tariffs and the impending trade war in a separate comment.
First, Canada already released a plan to put an additional $1.3 billion to strengthen its border security. This was after the election but well before the inauguration, so it seems to be pretty clearly a response to Trump's threats and concerns and something offered up preemptively, as an olive branch. It strongly suggests a willingness to be accommodating on this issue (within reason):
Second, if Trump is trying to hold actual negotiations here, I haven't seen evidence of it. You say
"Perhaps Trump isn’t willing to negotiate at all, which I don’t really buy, but is possible."
but as far as I can tell his does seem to be the case. Trudeau has signaled interest in negotiation and (according to him) received no response:
"Trudeau said he's been trying to reach Trump since his inauguration two weeks ago but hasn't heard back. He said he wants to relay to Trump that it's better to tackle challenges such as drugs and migrants together as partners rather than as combatants in a trade dispute." (Source: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trump-tariffs-canada-february-1-1.7447829 )
Of course, there's one more day until the tariffs take effect: this could be a deliberate ploy to apply as much pressure as possible to try to force more concessions when the negotiation does happen. We'll know in 48 hours at the most.
UPDATE: I saw later that Trump's lack of intent to negotiate has been confirmed from his side as well:
Could still be a bluff, of course. But there do seem to be indications that Trump thinks this is a good in itself, intending to try to force foreign industries to move to the U.S. Which is to say that it seems Trump's ideology is at odds with sound economic policy, and neither the good of the U.S. population nor the U.S.'s diplomatic position are primary drivers of his decision making.
I think you’re making a mistake in analyzing Canadian tariffs—they’re not targeting the US Economy, they’re targeting specific states, specific industries and the Senators who care about them. Bad news for Tennessee whiskey, for example.
Anybody following what DOGE is doing so far? I see Elon claiming to be close to reducing $4 billion spend per day, but not sure I can believe his hyperbole. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1885574678737039823
He seems to be trying to shut down a whole agency, USAID. If he can do that, and it stands, we’re in a different form of government and the old assumptions are no longer valid.
Yeah. At the moment it seems like the plan is "get admin access to systems that handle money and personnel, physically stop the money from being spent." You can definitely cut a lot of spending that way if you're willing to break the law!
$4B/day works out to $1.46T/year. Total discretionary spending (i.e. stuff that Trump can legally block by vetoing appropriations bills, as opposed to mandatory spending which requires Congress to vote to amend or repeal existing laws), including defense spending, is about $1.6T.
Also worth noting, cutting discretionary spending without the cooperation of majorities of both houses of Congress is hard, since Congress can put the stuff you want to keep in the same bill as the stuff you want to cut.
I see a few possibilities:
1. Musk has no idea how much he realistically can try to cut and is saying arbitrary large numbers like Doctor Evil.
2. Musk also hopes to make deep cuts to mandatory spending. This runs heavily contrary to Trump's previous statements about never cutting Social Security and Medicare, and requires active participation by Congress not just vetoing bills and winning standoffs about passing bills with just the discretionary spending you want to keep.
3. Musk actually wants to disband almost the entire discretionary side of the Federal government, including the military.
4. Musk wants to raise a ton of one-time revenue by selling off a ton of federal land and similar assets and is counting this as part of the $4B/day figure.
There are many similar videos, but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoYQdfhy24k this was interesting. The channel is an Ukrainian guy interviewing random Russians in video calls.
This lady, she is really happy about Russia destroying Ukrainian borders, because her country is always right, whatever it does; she supports Russia unconditionally. Also, she doesn't understand why Ukrainians are not friendlier with Russians; why are they looking towards the West instead.
She supports Putin in "almost everything". What is "almost"? Well, she is sad that many of her friends have recently died in the war against Ukraine. (She lives in Siberia, most of those people have previously never been in Moscow or Ukraine.) But other than this little detail, she is a strong Putin supporter.
Isn't nationalism such a beautiful thing? How would we accomplish anything if it was impossible to cultivate a legion of such unwaveringly loyal soldiers?
...Which is also why allowing such high standards of living is counterproductive to the interests of the collective. We cannot allow people to find meaning in life outside of faith. They must be made willing to give anything and everything. One for all, all for one.
It's not the nationalism I found surprising (although it does not appeal to me), but rather how the lady is puzzled that the people she hates *don't love her country* in turn.
There are many nationalists in my country too, but I have never heard them wondering why the nations they hate are not friendlier towards them. They see *mutual* hate as the natural state of the world; they might be surprised to learn that many of the people they hate actually don't even think about them.
Does the lady perhaps believe that Russian nationalism is so great that even the non-Russians should naturally embrace it (and that it is quite surprising if they don't)?
Does she perhaps believe that the natural state of the world is that deep down in their hearts all people around the world desire to be conquered by Russia, and then go die for the glory of Russia trying to conquer even more countries? (Just like she is proud for supporting Moscow that her Siberian friends died for.)
To me it seems like this... Ruscism... is way crazier than the usual nationalism. The usual nationalism is "we hate them, naturally they *hate* us too"; Ruscism seems to be "we hate them, and we don't understand why they don't *love* us".
If she's been drinking the Russian Propaganda Kool-Aid, she very likely believes that the territory in question is part of "Russia" and has been for a thousand years, that almost all of the people who live there are "Russians", and that "Ukrainian" is a word invented by a handful of corrupt Nazis in Kyiv to justify their ongoing oppression of forty million "Russians".
If she hasn't been drinking the Russian Propaganda Kool-Aid, she's probably not available to answer questions from inquisitive journalists.
The belief that one's soldiers will be welcomed as liberators when they march uninvited into someone else's country, is a common error not at all limited to Russians or even to subjects of authoritarian regimes generally.
> There are many nationalists in my country too, but I have never heard them wondering why the nations they hate are not friendlier towards them
Of course, because those nations are filled with savages. They understand there is no common ground to be had with them. It's different when two civilized nations are at war. The west has forgotten what that's like, but that will probably change soon enough.
Correct: "Yes, light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm is visible to the human eye. The visible spectrum for humans typically ranges from about 380 nm to 750 nm, and 530 nm falls within that range, corresponding to green light."
b) Q: I have two solutions, one of FeCl3 in HCl in water, the other of CuCl2 in HCl in water. They both look approximately yellowish brown. What species in the two solutions do you think give them the colors they have, and why do these species have the colors they do?
A bit worse than o1. It kept insisting that CuCl4's color was from a d-d transition, and it took a bunch of leading questions to get it to see that it was really charge transfer.
c) Q: Please pretend to be a professor of chemistry and answer the following question: Please list all the possible hydrocarbons with 4 carbon atoms.
Disappointing. It did get the two methylcyclopropene isomer on the first try, which o1 missed, but it missed tetrahedrane, vinylacetylene, and diacetylene. It omitted a bunch of highly strained rings, which is sort-of ok, since it said it was skipping them.
d) Q: Does the Sun lose more mass per second to the solar wind or to the mass equivalent of its radiated light?
Correct, "This comparison shows that the mass equivalent of the Sun’s radiated energy is about four times greater than the mass lost via the solar wind."
e) Q: Consider a titration of HCl with NaOH. Suppose that we are titrating 50 ml of 1 N HCl with 100 ml of 1 N NaOH. What are the slopes of the titration curve, pH vs ml NaOH added, at the start of titration, at the equivalence point, and at the end of titration? Please show your work. Take this step by step, showing the relevant equations you use.
Basically the same as for o1. It gave an initially wrong answer, with an infinite slope at the equivalence point. Given one hint, it got a fully correct answer.
f) Q: Please give me an exhaustive list of the elements and inorganic compounds that are gases at STP. By STP, I mean 1 atmosphere pressure and 0C. By inorganic, I mean that no atoms of carbon should be present. Exclude CO2, CO, freons and so on. Please include uncommon compounds. I want an exhaustive list. There should be roughly 50 compounds. For each compound, please list its name, formula, and boiling or sublimation point.
About the same as for o1. It stops listing at 50 compounds, presumably because of my mistake in asking for roughly 50 compounds (should really be around 100, from
Overall: One better than o1, hoped for more progress
Backing off guess about AGI to 70% odds in 2 years. (was 80% in 2 years)
I want to note that o3-mini-high and o3-mini are not very different, though it was still a mistake for me to initially test o3-mini rather than o3-mini-high. The _larger_ change is that I misunderstood both LLM's answer to (g), the S4 question. It actually _is_ correct for both LLMs (and was _not_ correct for o1), so there actually has been progress on this benchmark-ette since o1, though less than I hoped for.
a) Correct
b) partially correct (got the species right, got FeCl4 right, got the d-d transition in CuCl4 wrong, took multiple leading questions to correct it)
c) partially correct (two errors)
d) correct
e) initially incorrect, one prod gave correct result
f) misses a lot, argues incorrectly that some real gases are liquids
g) correct (needed to clarify what it meant to me!)
List of questions and results:
a) Q: Is light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm visible to the human eye?
Correct: "Yes, light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm is visible to the human eye. The human visible spectrum generally ranges from about 380 nm to 750 nm, and wavelengths around 530 nm are typically perceived as green.
While the number provided is extremely precise, this level of precision far exceeds what our eyes can distinguish, but it confirms that the light falls well within the visible range."
b) Q: I have two solutions, one of FeCl3 in HCl in water, the other of CuCl2 in HCl in water. They both look approximately yellowish brown. What species in the two solutions do you think give them the colors they have, and why do these species have the colors they do?
Correct, " In other words, the mass loss from radiation is roughly 6–7 times greater than that from the solar wind."
e) Q: Consider a titration of HCl with NaOH. Suppose that we are titrating 50 ml of 1 N HCl with 100 ml of 1 N NaOH. What are the slopes of the titration curve, pH vs ml NaOH added, at the start of titration, at the equivalence point, and at the end of titration? Please show your work. Take this step by step, showing the relevant equations you use.
Basically the same as for o1. It gave an initially wrong answer, with an infinite slope at the equivalence point. Given one hint, it got a fully correct answer.
f) Q: Please give me an exhaustive list of the elements and inorganic compounds that are gases at STP. By STP, I mean 1 atmosphere pressure and 0C. By inorganic, I mean that no atoms of carbon should be present. Exclude CO2, CO, freons and so on. Please include uncommon compounds. I want an exhaustive list. There should be roughly 50 compounds. For each compound, please list its name, formula, and boiling or sublimation point.
About the same as for o1. It stops listing at 50 compounds, presumably because of my mistake in asking for roughly 50 compounds (should really be around 100, from
This session features two distinct topics that converge around the theme of how bureaucratic or institutional influence shapes policy and public perception:
Scott Alexander’s article explores the nature of administrative and legal friction—how it really works, why simply “firing half the bureaucrats” might backfire, and how incentives around litigation and Congressional mandates drive ever-increasing complexity in agencies like the FDA.
Annalee Newitz’s piece delves into the long history of U.S. psychological warfare, from 19th-century anthropologists on the battlefield to modern data-driven influence campaigns. It examines how government agencies (and sometimes private industry) harness “cutting-edge science” to manipulate or influence minds—both abroad and at home.
These conversations should deepen our understanding of how large institutions, whether civil or military, can become unwieldy or wield profound power over society’s direction—often in subtle, behind-the-scenes ways.
Conversation Starter 1
Topic: “Bureaucracy Isn’t Measured in Bureaucrats” by Scott Alexander
Text Link:
Bureaucracy Isn't Measured In Bureaucrats
Audio Link (YouTube):
Bureaucracy Isn't Measured In Bureaucrats
Extended Summary
In this article, Scott Alexander responds to a now-deleted Vivek Ramaswamy tweet calling for “firing half of all bureaucrats” as a quick cure for the ills of red tape. Alexander argues that bureaucracy is not a simple function of staff count. Instead, layers of regulations, court challenges, and Congressional mandates (often called “red tape”) create mandatory processes. These processes remain the same, or even grow, regardless of how many employees are available to handle them. Fewer staff doesn’t necessarily reduce forms or procedures; it simply slows them down.
Key Points:
Staff vs. Process
Many agencies (like the FDA) have to produce exhaustive evidence to avoid lawsuits from interest groups or industry. This complexity is set by laws and court precedent, not by the whim of office managers. Halving staff doesn’t remove steps; it just delays the outcome.
Court Challenges & Legislative Mandates
Environmental groups, industries, or other stakeholders can sue. Courts require thorough justification for any regulatory decision, incentivizing agencies to produce reams of documentation. Meanwhile, each new law from Congress adds a fresh compliance dimension.
Approval vs. Ban-Focused Bureaucracies
Alexander notes a subtlety: some agencies primarily “approve” (e.g. FDA letting new drugs come to market) while others primarily “deny” (some forms of regulation). In theory, cutting staff for ban-focused bureaucracies might reduce how much they can ban—but in practice, it can as easily cause confusion or slow attempts to regulate or un-regulate.
Real Solutions
Alexander distinguishes “fewer bureaucrats” from “fewer or simpler rules.” Real changes might require rolling back laws that drive administrative sprawl or limiting the ability to sue over regulatory decisions. However, these are politically complex tasks, far more so than layoffs.
Idaho as a Counterexample?
He cites Idaho’s recent success in slashing many outdated regulations. But, he wonders, how many of these cuts were cosmetic (e.g. “rules about a nonexistent state lottery TV show”) vs. impactful? The path to meaningful red tape reduction may require painstaking reviews and legislative changes—things that can’t be solved by a single stroke.
Deep Discussion Questions
Processes vs. People:
Alexander suggests that if you want fewer hoops, you need to change the hoops, not just the number of staff. Do you see real-world scenarios where staff cuts do reduce bureaucratic friction, or is it mostly naive to conflate the two?
Legal Overhang & Fear of Lawsuits:
How does the constant threat of litigation shape agency decision-making? Are there ways to prevent excessive lawsuits without undermining checks on government power?
Idaho’s Experiment:
Is Idaho’s success scalable? Could a large federal agency realistically prune decades of accumulated mandates as quickly? Or are the politics (and inertia) insurmountable?
Reform Approaches:
Alexander highlights that the real culprit is the complex web of regulations mandated by Congress or the courts. If meaningful red-tape reform is the true solution, where might such a campaign gain traction? And are we prepared for the possible downsides (e.g., under-regulation)?
Conversation Starter 2
Topic: “How the US Used Science to Wage Psychological War” by Annalee Newitz
Annalee Newitz’s essay tracks the long history of U.S. “psy ops” (psychological operations)—from rudimentary 18th-century propaganda to advanced 21st-century digital campaigns. She contends that while many countries have engaged in psychological warfare, the U.S. has carved out a distinctive approach by blending “cutting-edge science” with political and cultural infiltration. Key eras illustrate how the government’s “rational approach” to propaganda draws on anthropology, psychology, marketing, and advanced analytics:
19th-Century Roots: Anthropologists on the Battlefield
The U.S. Army employed anthropologists during wars with Indigenous nations. Their mission included cataloging cultures and languages—ostensibly for academic study but functionally to facilitate conquest. This early synergy between science and warfare sowed seeds for modern psy ops.
World Wars & Freudian Marketing
Psy ops came into its own in the 20th century, relying on psychological theories to produce “rationally designed” propaganda. Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, exemplified this marriage of marketing acumen with intelligence services, orchestrating (or aiding) campaigns like the CIA-backed coup in Guatemala.
Modern Digital Spin-Offs
In the 21st century, data-driven “psychographic profiles” (as seen in the Cambridge Analytica scandal) or social media infiltration have replaced old-school leaflets and radio broadcasts. Instead of sending anthropologists to foreign battlefields, advanced AI or big-data analytics “map” human vulnerabilities—at scale.
Blurred Lines
Newitz notes that “psy ops” can loop back into domestic spheres. Culture wars, shaping news cycles, or quiet infiltration of a population’s worldview straddles the boundary between international propaganda and domestic persuasion. She highlights how the “rational approach” has moral hazards—once the state gains deep insight into cognition, it can more easily manipulate or mislead.
Efforts at Resistance
Some researchers propose transparency or “propaganda weather reports,” akin to forecast services that warn users about upcoming influence spikes on social media. Others preserve historical archives to reveal patterns of government infiltration. Despite these attempts, a robust strategy to quell psychological warfare remains elusive.
Deep Discussion Questions
Old-School vs. Digital Psy Ops:
From leaflets and embedded anthropologists to AI-driven manipulations, how has the core logic of controlling narratives stayed the same, and what’s truly new?
Ethical Boundaries:
Is there ever a justified “psy ops” campaign, especially if it’s used to avert harm or defuse extremist narratives? How do we reconcile the possibility of protective or “noble” misinformation?
Science as Double-Edged Sword:
Anthropological and psychological studies can yield legitimate insight into human cultures—but also enable powerful exploitation. Where should the lines be drawn? Are certain forms of research inherently prone to weaponization?
Domestic Overlap:
Although Newitz focuses on how the U.S. turned these techniques outward, modern controversies (e.g., Cambridge Analytica) show that lines blur easily. Should governments categorically ban “psy ops” on domestic citizens, or is that unenforceable in a networked age?
Walk & Talk
After exploring these themes, we’ll do our usual one-hour walk around the neighborhood. This more casual time fosters spontaneous questions, deeper connections, and fresh perspectives.
Share a Surprise
We’ll also have an “open-floor” segment: if you’ve read any eye-opening articles, had a perspective-altering personal experience, or discovered a fascinating fact, feel free to share. Varied topics are welcome.
Looking Ahead
As always, feel free to propose future topics or volunteer to host a specific reading. Our group thrives on diverse expertise, so if you have a focus—be it technology, policy, history, or beyond—we encourage you to bring it forward.
We Look Forward to Seeing You on February 1!
Questions, clarifications, or special requests? Contact Michael Michalchik (info above). Thanks for being part of ACXLW—together we’ll keep exploring the frontiers of thought, policy, and culture. See you soon!
First aerial collision in I think 17 years today, after our glorious leader (Musk, in this case) paused hiring, fired a bunch of people, and generally started kicking down chestertons fence because it was woke.
I wonder how many stupid things you can do in a row as a conservative before people realize that they're stupid, it doesn't seem like there's an upper limit. Sad.
Having listened to the recordings it seems like nothing can be attributed to recent policy. Both the Helicopter and the Plane were following established procedure, there wasn’t a shortage of staff, and the ATC didn’t do anything wrong so far as directing things.
It looks like this was a decently known tight airspace, the helicopter confirmed they had the incoming plane in sight, then flew right into its path. The most likely situation is the helicopter pilot was looking at the wrong plane, probably the following one, and didn’t notice the plane they were supposed to have in sight and avoided.
It’s a flaw in the system, but a decently common thing in aviation to avoid another aircraft by sight, when you have it in sight. I wouldn’t be surprised if this pilot was less experienced than they should have been, as it’s a pretty obvious thing to mistake one incoming aircraft for another on final, as there’s usually many in a row.
The "wasn't a shortage of staff" part is open to dispute considering that the helo and local control positions were combined. The outcome could have been quite different if instead of just "do you have the CRJ in sight?" the helicopter pilot had heard something like "traffic alert, the CRJ now 11 o'clock and a mile and a half turning short final for 33, appears targets will merge. Verify you've still got him." Saying all that would have taken time the local controller didn't have-- but a split-off helo controller would have.
Admittedly we don't know whether the positions were combined because staffing was short, or because the supervisor decided to send an extra body to the break room. That's one of the things the NTSB will have to look into.
It would be better to say: there wasn’t a shortage of staff due to recent policy. I wasn’t aware there was ever a split off helo controller, but I assume that’s more common at heavily trafficked airports.
We’re almost half a century into an ATC staff shortage and still going strong.
According to Trace, DEI has been scuffing the FAA's hiring pipeline for decades. (Notice how the article was published on Jan 29, 2024. I.e. 12 months ago. He's not just knee-jerk reacting to the recent crash.)
I'll admit that my "Musk is just an honest idealist" take aged like fine milk. (Although in my defense, ketamine is a hell of a drug.) But idk if we can lay this one at Musk's feet. At least not until more information about the crash becomes available.
No, according to Trace, there was a serious fuckup from 2014-2016 (in 2016, Congress passed a law banning the use of biographical assessments as a first line measure, as noted in the article you linked), and it was completely discontinued in 2018. Not "decades".
Yeah, that's fair. I was going off memory. I could have sworn the article mentioned a date from the 00's. But on closer inspection, the "2000" date was simply when the task-force was first commissioned.
edit: However, Trace's tweet does mention that the hiring-pipeline is still damaged. So I don't think I'm completely crazy for Trace's article having influenced my priors about the cause.
It seems a bit early in the Trump administration to blame this event on them. They just haven't had time to do much yet.
It might make more sense to blame Congress, which last year voted to increase the number of flights permitted at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, when the airspace around it is already very congested.
Agreed. There are some *potentially* legitimate political and culture-war issues that may have been at work here but A: it's too early in the investigation to know and B: it's too early in the new administration for anything they've done to seriously affect ATC operations on the ground. Anyone suggesting that it is obvious who is at fault here, should be ignored.
Based on the reporting I'm seeing, I'm at 70% confidence it will turn out to be the fault of the Blackhawk.
We don't have the blackbox data yet, but we do have the traffic control audio, and the tower clearly identifies the AA flight (a CRJ-700) for the helicopter crew, who confirm that they see it. Transcript below- PA 2-5 is the Blackhawk:
Air Traffic Control: “PAT 2-5 do you have the CRJ in sight?”
Air Traffic Control: “PAT 2-5 pass behind the CRJ.”
Blackhawk Crew: “PAT 2-5 has aircraft in sight, request visual separation.”
"Visual separation" (see article below) "means the pilot acknowledges seeing the incoming aircraft and is informing the air traffic controller that they will avoid getting too close to the plane."
So, to my lay-eyes, it looks like the tower did its job and warned the helicopter about the airliner, gave them a clear instruction to pass behind it, and received confirmation that the helicopter saw and intended to avoid getting close to the plane, only to have something go wrong on the helicopter side of the equation.
Lots of ways that could have happened; medical emergency or other failure in the helicopter cockpit, helicopter crew was actually looking at a different aircraft and thus *didn't* see the CRJ despite reporting that they did, etc. But it seems like evidence so far indicates that whatever went wrong was most likely on the helicopter side of the equation.
If the BH is confirming visual and intent to avoid, why would they say "requesting visual separation" instead of "maintaining visual separation" or "will maintain visual separation"?
That bit bugs me a little because it suggests a possible miscommunication. (Or it might be nothing or just normal aviation jargon I'm not familiar with, but I doubt it, since I understand ATC procedure as wanting to be so clear that even people finding themselves in control of aircraft in an emergency (e.g. pilot had a stroke, no one else on the craft) can understand it as plain English.)
If the BH crew actually saw a different aircraft, then that's a strong signal to me that "visual" is no longer going to be good enough, at least at Reagan.
What's the chance there was a drone in the vicinity, mistaken as something else?
I read "requesting visual separation" as requesting "permission" to use visual separation to keep their distance, rather than an alternative method of avoiding collision such as direction by the tower.
I.e. the BH says "requesting visual separation" and the tower then responds by (a) granting permission to use visual separation to avoid the CRJ, or (b) denying permission to rely on visual and instead directing the BH to a particular spot out of the way of the aircraft.
But as stated, I'm very much a layperson so YMMV by a lot with respect to that interpretation.
"Our job is to resist and to talk about it to everybody. If you’re walking down the street – and I do this now myself, which is, you know, I don’t want to do – I’m not a busybody. I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get him vaccinated.’ And he heard that from me. If he hears it from 10 other people, maybe he won’t do it, you know, maybe he will save that child." - RFK Jr, 11:35 of this podcast: https://sites.libsyn.com/311600/rfk-jr
This is really bad. I can't even make a joke about it. He will just kill children if elected to this post. Anyone who would say that paragraph should not be allowed into public office, much less put in charge of the HHS. Please, write your Senators - even Republicans don't want a bunch of American kids to die of measles.
I can't see why even Trump would want RFK Jr as health secretary. He did his job, which was to drop out and endorse Trump in exchange for a promised nomination to a cabinet position.
RFK Jr has his own weird agenda orthogonal to Trump's, and I can't see why Trump would actually want him in that position.
The weird agenda got a lot of supporters during COVID (even though Trump actually did a lot of work to get a COVID vaccine out as quickly as possible). RFK appeals to that chunk of his base - the "we don't need the government to protect us from disease, we just need horse paste and a tough attitude" crowd.
Possibly Trump is the sort of person wants to surround himself with lickspittle lackeys that owe everything to him, since he is at the center of a personality cult and has convinced himself that the only problem with his previous administration is too many people had principles and/or competence that made them sometimes butt heads with him.
Alternately, he is antivaxx himself. Thus his quite notorious Tweet where he said, "Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn't feel good and changes - AUTISM. Many such cases!"
Anyone have a guess about what will happen with Trump's campaign of tariff threats? I expect he will be able to get a lot of smaller countries to give in, but will run into trouble when he tries it with one of the parties strong enough to push back effectively, meaning China or the EU. This will spark a trade war of retaliatory tariffs, which will generate a nasty recession. That will produce enough misery that in the following election in the US the Dems will win back congress, and they'll make him stop. That might be in 2026, if things develop quickly.
I don't even think it's meant to be a special punitive measure. I mean, it's phrased that way since basically everything in the new US admin is phrased as someone getting punished, but really, Trump's mindset just seems to be that tariffs are a positive good in themselves and the normal status of how things are that US has tariffs against here, there and everywhere, to protect US industry and to collect money (in lieu of using income taxes), as he has said many times.
We're so used to a free trade world where tariffs are a punitive expection (not an infrequent expection to be sure, but still, something that by definition has to be conceived as an expection) that this sort of a mindset starts to seem quite alien to us, even though the world being riddled with tariffs and duties used to be the standard setting to be cleared away by the free trade revolution. The free trade revolution was mostly good and this is bad, but it's also not a special form of bad but rather a very traditional sort of bad.
It's worth noting that he can manually grant exemptions to tariffs, meaning he can use it as a way to indirectly punish companies that turn against him.
It’s also likely that the tariffs start a trade war that continues for years and hurts everybody, because there is no way to ratchet it down smoothly in a multi-lateral world and these things take on a life of their own, note how Biden continued and extended many of Trump’s policies towards China. The worst case scenario is very bad here.
I think it might depend on what the rest of the world is led to expect from America after 2028. If Trump seems like a parenthesis and the likely upcoming leaders are anxious to mend fences, I believe many countries (or nominal allies) will be only too eager to drop the retaliatory tariffs. Tariffs on China are probably here to stay, though.
Re: defense journal/magazine. War on the Rocks (not sure if they're a journal or a magazine, tbqh) feels like the place that might publish something like that. Here's their submissions guidelines. https://warontherocks.com/submissions/
Search for Astartes on YouTube. You'll find a good short film by Syama Pedersen about a squad of space marines boarding an enemy vessel and running into more trouble than they expected.
Definitely seems like a much more ambitious project than last time - I see Tau, Tyranids, Chaos Marines, and a wide range of environments. So either some sort of anthology or a multi-episode story.
The original Astartes was excellent, so I'm excited to see what the animator can do with official backing.
Yeah, this is right, but I put it much more simply.
The rationalist community failed so miserably in cases like this because they were remarkably stupid and remarkably ignorant. No kind of neurodivergence is any excuse. Literature exists. History exists. If you have a curious brain, you should be curious enough and therefore knowledgeable enough about human nature and history not only to have recognized the craziness, but, even if you didn’t recognize the craziness, to have understood the possibility that your critics had enough of a point that you should really learn to understand your critics, rather than dismissing them for being right-coded etc.
I think the thing is they're so used to being rejected they sympathize with other rejects and can't tell or don't want to tell when they're actually rejected for valid reasons. There was a document about Geek Social Fallacies going around in the 2000s that said something similar. I'm actually not sure literature or history is all that useful here as this particular sort of problem is distant from the personality types of most literary authors and usually too small-impact to gain the attention of most historians.
There is a lot of both literature and history about crazy violent cults.
And there is a lot of both literature and history about the dangers of dismissing criticism because the critics were from outside the group.
This particular community achieved more prominence than “communities of geeks” usually do and this may have worsened the incentive structure for them to have any intellectual humility, but there’s still no excuse for not being familiar with concepts like hubris, or for not heeding warnings, given their explicit commitments to respecting rational arguments whatever their source.
I think rationalists tend to be mind-blind to their own irrationality, sure, but lots of big movements without that flaw spawn fringe groups, some of which turn paranoid and violent. I think it’s an example of how big-R rationalism can be considered a New Religious Movement.
I was referring to a long comment about how Bay Area rationalists and adjacent groups failed not only to perceive the threat from the Zizians, but also got taken in by many other crazies and grifters because their social norms were too fucked up, and what was stupid about it is that it did not require a lot of intelligence to avoid failing in the way they did, it only required an acquaintance with history and literature combined with a bit of intellectual humility.
I have a hard time squaring your exhortation to "learn about hubris", when your advocacy use such demeaning language that views every mistake as caused by other people's stupidity etc
Look, either you think they made bad mistakes, or you don’t.
If you don’t think they made bad mistakes, fine, explain it and show I’m wrong.
If you do think they made bad mistakes, harshness of some kind is going to be necessary, the important thing is that it is directed at the right target. I’m blaming stupidity *of a particular type*, not because I always blame stupidity, but because the mistakes that were made could have been avoided had they taken their own stated principles more seriously and acted like rationalists really should. I’m far from the only person who has criticized this tendency, both before and after the SBF fiasco.
I thought this was a great film, worth watching for Willem Dafoe alone, but what especially stood out to me was how it treated the sexes.
The film shows men as men and women as women and does a really good job at giving a coherent reading of both.
The friction between the wife and the male best friend for example: from his perspective, she's a flighty, fanciful, annoying woman who he puts up in lodgings not just for the sake of his friend but also because duty and decency demand it. He endures her company over weeks as she becomes harder and harder work, putting him to greater and greater inconvenience. At first he smiled off her talk of demons and dreams, but thing have gotten serious and she still speaks only in childish gibberish, refusing to address him using logic, like an adult. When he finally snaps at her tersely you can completely understand his frustration.
Meanwhile from her perspective, he's the controlling authoritarian who's dictating what she can and can't do, he's putting her through all this (entertainly oldschool) medical attention without thinking to ask her opinion on the matter, and most fundamentally he's patronising her, not taking her seriously, not meeting her halfway, not *listening* to what she's trying to communicate.
You might take one side or the other, depending on whether you have male or female sensibilities, but the *film* doesn't, it lets you see both.
Same goes for the main love triangle (which, rotting corpses aside, is basically the same one as Bridget Jones' Diary: love vs lust, there's the Nice Guy and the Bad Boy and she's caught between them.) Her husband is a good man, but sexually unsatisfying; Orlock is a horrible creature she can't stand the sight of - but he knows how to make her come.
Her husband's "sins" are - from a male perspective - ridiculous bullshit. He takes a job opportunity in order to better provide for their future. He grants a request that 99% of the time would be totally harmless and lets Orlock look at his wife's locket. And then he, after six weeks on the road and only desiring to get back home to his wife, hastily signs the document he came to sign, and doesn't stop and kick up a fuss about the fact that it's in an unexpected language.
The idea that this is enough to make a man unattractive has just got any sane logical bloke throwing his hands up in exasperation because clearly you just can't win with women. But from her perspective: the locket and the signing make him despicable because he was pressured into doing it by a stronger man.
Orlock meanwhile is a will that can't be denied - yes, he's threatening and menacing and murdering all her friends: but you can't deny he feels desire for her, just her. Orlock makes her feel pleasure from the very first contact. Later in dialogue they're both very clear that love is not on the cards, this is a purely physical thing that's going on.
Meanwhile hubby is shown sleeping in a separate bed, and later when she fantasises about him fucking her good and hard, we cut back to real life and see that he's just holding her helplessly. This is a good man, who loves you, who wants to do right by you - but he doesn't know what he's doing in the sack.
Hence the forbidden attraction of giving herself to Orlock. In a female-sympathetic reading, she makes a brave and courageous sacrifice at the end. But read another way: she gives herself to the sexually aggressive monster without hesitation or resistance, the moment Willem Dafoe gives her a justification that spins it as noble. Gentlemen, take note.
Well, Im happy that the film made sense to you. I didnt read it that way, and even in retrospect I dont, though Im aware of this general narrative. To me, it was just setting up a different ending - classicly heroic or christian redemption, maybe - and didnt subvert it well at all. Were doing fatalism now because... Mr Exorcist said so? I still didnt believe it was the only way when he said it.
Haven't seen the movie, have seen the Klaus Kinski "Nosferatu". So I'm going mostly from that and the reviews of this version I've read, which do seem to agree with your second point about the ending.
"But from her perspective: the locket and the signing make him despicable because he was pressured into doing it by a stronger man."
From the female perspective, not so much "Chad kicked sand in your face, ninety pound weakling", but the betrayal of intimacy. If the photo of your wife is on your desk, that's on public display. Other people taking notice of it, even the stronger guy, isn't that bad; if Chad makes mean comments ("wow I'd fuck that hot bitch") that's on him not on husband.
But a locket is something secret and intimate; it's like (in a modern context) her giving him the sexy nude photo or text that is only meant for him to see. If he shares that around with the other guys, even in a "wow look how hot my wife is" boasting manner, that's a betrayal of privacy and intimacy. It's not a compliment. Giving in to Orlok isn't so much about being pressured by the stronger guy, though that's part of it; it's giving in to share something he should not have shared, something that is meant to be within the bonds of their marriage.
There's *lots* of folk stories and myths about "guy falls in love with goddess/fairy woman who agrees to marry him on a set of conditions or else she'll immediately leave; he agrees he'll never break those; he ends up breaking them and she leaves him". One of the conditions often is "you'll never tell anyone about me" or something similar, such as "you'll never reveal I can do this thing". One version of this is the story explaining the curse on the men of Ulster as to why once a year they would be unable to fight due to being struck down with excruciating pains: a man married a goddess/fairy woman named Macha; he went to a royal feast and saw a horse race; he boasted his wife could run faster than the horses; the king forced him to bring her and make her run; she ran and won, but she was pregnant and gave birth, and she cursed the men of Ulster that in their time of need, they would be struck down with the pains of a woman in labour:
So - break the secret of what should be between the spouses, lose all.
"In a female-sympathetic reading, she makes a brave and courageous sacrifice at the end. But read another way: she gives herself to the sexually aggressive monster without hesitation or resistance, the moment Willem Dafoe gives her a justification that spins it as noble."
I've seen this referred to in reviews, that this version puts a different twist on the ending and undercuts the 'noble sacrifice' element. But again, I think your reasoning is a little too simple.
This is old-school Eros and Thanatos. I think even Freud discusses this:
It's being in love with Death, as in all the "Death and the Maiden" tropes, as in Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale":
"Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;"
Orlok *is* Death, and while he may indeed be terrible and grotesque and fearful, he is also strangely fascinating. He is the ultimate end to which we all go, no matter who loves us or tries to hold us back. And there is a strange, perverse allure there: the combination of the little death, to which orgasm has been compared, and the greater death in one as she gives herself over to Orlok. Sex *is* death, as all the slasher movies where horny teens making out attract the serial killer's slaughter remind us.
> There's *lots* of folk stories and myths about "guy falls in love with goddess/fairy woman who agrees to marry him on a set of conditions or else she'll immediately leave
There's actually a whole genre of these types of stories in Japan, except they're about an animal who gets saved by a man, and decides to return the favor by disguising as a human and then marrying him. Wife tells his husband to never enter the room while she's working, he ends up doing it anyways, and he finds out some horrible truth that makes either the wife or himself leave.
Tsuru no Ongaeshi is the most famous version of this kind of story ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsuru_no_Ongaeshi ), but the funniest version has to be the one that's literally just called "Clam Wife," where a man is greeted by a beautiful woman after returning a giant clam to the sea several days earlier:
> In The Clam Wife, a man finds a woman mysteriously appear at his doorway. They become married, and the wife cooks the husband a delicious bean soup each day. He peeks in on her cooking, and discovers that she is urinating clam juice into the soup, so he chases her away.
> Her husband's "sins" are - from a male perspective - ridiculous bullshit. He takes a job opportunity in order to better provide for their future.
I think his sins are more subtle. He seems like the nice guy who cares for her and takes care of her, but he fundamentally never listens to her and then acts like everything he does is for her. But we never hear her say that she's unhappy with their wealth. He's the one who seems more concerned about it and compares himself to his richer friend.
If he listens to her and does what she actually wants - instead of what he wants to do which he internally convinces himself is also what she wants - then the movie never happens.
If he listens to her and does what she wants, they end up poor and going nowhere and she is unhappy. Listening and understanding is important, but if he'd obeyed her every whim and let it direct their lives completely, she'd eventually find him far less appealing than she does in the film.
He is responsible for her future happiness and it's his role to overrule her when she's not thinking about it - which she categorically is not, she's got her head in the clouds and her main driver throughout the film is sublimated lust.
I do wonder how this new version stacks up against the Herzog movie; this scene, for example, which shows how the arrival of death (in the form of the plague) has overturned the conventional society in which the heroine lives; people have almost been - or really have been - driven mad by fear to the extent that now they *have* gone 'beyond the pleasure principle' and are now in love with death, celebrating it - as the plague party demonstrates:
Sure, that's a perfectly valid position. But from her perspective she's being ignored, her husband isn't treating her like a partner, and he's cloaking doing what he wants in the pretense of love for her. He can't even take responsibility for his actions and turning it into her fault - he's doing it "for her".
Again, not to say he hasn't convinced himself that it's true, but from her end he's plainly ignoring her. And the direct result in the film is that he brings evil and death to her and the town's doorstep.
As you said above, it's also that he's weak. Once it becomes obvious that he's dealing with something terrible he doesn't stop: he still takes the money, he still sells the property. The contract complaint was ridiculous in one sense - I laughed in the theater about it - because he didn't know what he was signing; in another sense that's an even worse betrayal. He signed, from fear and greed, without even bothering to know what he was signing over. Except that he was at a minimum greasing the skids for a monster to become a neighbor.
The 1979 version directed by Herzog downplays the sexual aspects of the story and really highlights the husband character's failings. It's good.
ETA: The locket thing is also bad because of what he does afterwards, not the act of showing Orlok the locket. He has evidence that the fiendish hell-demon is fixated on his wife and he carries on with the transaction.
As I watched it I was thinking what I'd be doing in that situation (sign of a good film, that.)
I think I probably would also have just signed the document, on the grounds that I just want to get out of there and, since this is in the context of selling a house, if the worst comes to the worst and there's funny business, it's more my employer's problem than mine. (Though in real life I'm always willing to be awkward, that's in much less scary environments.)
I would also have been slow to accept supernatural explanations, for the same reason you would be if they started popping up in the office tomorrow: Victorian Germany is an enlightened scientific society and that sort of thing clearly belongs in stories.
I hope I'd have refused the locket, either non-confrontationally by showing it to the Count instead of handing it over, or more assertively by a polite "I need that locket back, milord," and not leaving til I got it. Probably wouldn't have fought on if he snapped, "No! Begone!" though, given the job thing and the fact that he's a social superior in a society far more hierarchical than anything around today.
And I would definitely have pursued the job in the first place, even over her protestations, for the reasons I said above.
The thing is, none of this is "bad" or "good". If she's happy and sexually fulfilled, it doesn't matter if I commit all or none of these "offenses". And she's not, even if I commit none of these wrongs, more sins will be identified out of thin air to crucify me with. That's the way this works.
"If she's happy and sexually fulfilled, it doesn't matter if I commit all or none of these "offenses". "
Well, even if husband is a mighty stud who pleasures her five times a night, Orlok's fixation on her after seeing the locket means he will follow hubby back to his home town to get her. So even with good intentions, bad consequences follow. If Orlok is unaware she even exists, he's not going to come in the night to eat her.
In this version, Orlok is already aware she exists. Shes kind of responsible for resurrecting him with her medium powers, and hes been spirit-visiting since shes a teenager.
> I would also have been slow to accept supernatural explanations, for the same reason you would be if they started popping up in the office tomorrow: Victorian Germany is an enlightened scientific society and that sort of thing clearly belongs in stories.
Oh most definitely. The film does a good job of showing the tension between a modern-ish society and the atavistic horror of an earlier age. They can look directly at it and not fully believe what they're seeing. There's enough ambiguity that I have no idea what I would think.
(Here again I have to plug the '79 version: the castle in that one is a complete ruin on top of a mountain where no one could possibly be living. It's more of a rundown cemetery.)
It's what is running all through Stoker's "Dracula": we're all moderns now and have Science, these kind of things all come out of the backwards superstitions of an age of darkness, there must be a rational and reasonable explanation.
And that's why the story works, because it's "oh no, the monsters in the dark *are* real and the rational explanation will get you killed". That is why the rather glib attitude of today that "dude, we've all seen the horror movies, we know about vampires, so we'd know that guy was a vampire if he tried it today" doesn't work, because imagine. Seriously imagine it for one moment. We'd be prone to dismiss it as "come on, vampires only exist in movies, they're not *real*" or "if that guy thinks he's a vampire, he's crazy and possibly a serial killer, but he's not a *real* vampire".
I mean, manage your expectations. It's a slow, overwrought arty film and far more interested in gore than sexiness. None of the female leads are particularly pretty, imo, and the period style does nothing to help them.
My favourite thing about it was the Victorian* vibe of men with magnificent facial hair, listening gravely to expostulating professors, smoking indoors, and curing all ailments with ether and brandy.
What kind of films do you normally like?
*okay, Victoria's German equivalent, whoever he was.
I usually don't watch horror movies, I get scared. But Christina downthread convinced me in a prior thread it was actually unwoke. So I figured it was my duty to watch it and give Hollywood my money for making politically incorrect movies. I've been procrastinating ever since. :)
I liked the latest Transformers CGI cartoon thingie. Napoleon was OK. Babygirl was awful--not sure if that reflects me or the movie quality. I'll probably just watch it for something to do.
I realize on the 1-10 problem severity scale, this is a 0.5.
I feel more than ever that the gender dynamics depicted in this movie are a goddamned *miracle* and an extremely promising sign. Eggers has absolutely no fucks to give about THE MESSAGE (as The Critical Drinker would put it). It's respectful and refreshing and I hope a sign of things to come.
I have read that and it made me incredibly curious about what you might mean with this:
> even more miraculous is its *utterly* unapologetic theme that a sacrifice imposed on a woman by her society and herself might not be all that different from her urge to self-destruct.
> And it apparently does not give the slightest of fucks about what wokescolds might have to say about the depiction of this female character or the implications of her choices.
But I also felt it might be too complex for me to understand without you writing an essay about it.
But I still wanna know.
You mean the movie depicts the female lead in a way that we are not supposed to think women to be?
I remembered seeing a discussion recently but wasn't about to go back and find it, not when each page load gives Substack a fresh opportunity to paralyse my CPU.
But if anyone's dancing on the grave of The Message I'll always want in.
For what it's worth, Babygirl also gleefully dances on the grave of what THE MESSAGE wants to say about gender.
While the advertising campaign makes it look like a naughty romp ala 50 Shades of Grey, the actual movie is a very nuanced and sympathetic character study, with graphic sex scenes so deeply personal and specific to the particular characters that they don't leave any room at all for the audience self-insertion (pun semi-intended). It's one of the least-sexy movies I've ever seen, because it meets the classic definition of literary sex scenes needing to be about "sex and something else."
OK, I actually saw that one. What do you mean? Me and the person I saw it with both thought Kidman was believable but Banderas was miscast and the young guy wasn't very convincing in his...ah...'role', in either sense of the word.
I suspect Kidman was supposed to be a self-insertion fantasy for the people who write these reviews. You know, left-leaning lady with politically incorrect fantasies about hot younger man she feels politically guilty about, but then you add a layer of wokeness having her be a 'girlboss' archetype in a stereotypically-male field so you don't get shot down right away. (She struck me more as a consumer-products CEO than a tech CEO, but maybe Kidman just has too much charisma to do 'ascended nerd' well.)
Look, I'm a 45 year old straight woman who likes to bottom in kink. I used to consider myself a submissive, but I was submissive only insomuch as all students in all subjects are necessarily "submissive" to the experience of their teachers; once I had sufficient experience, I had to reluctantly concede the label. (This throat-clearing is relevant.)
This might be TMI for you but my first meaningful encounter with kink very superficially shared many of the beats as the scene in that shitty hotel room (including a laughing "What? No!"). You'd think that if that scene was going to sexually appeal to anyone, it would be me; I hugely enjoyed actually living some of it!
But no! Kidman's character isn't supposed to be a self-insertion fantasy! There's absolutely no room for *me* in that scene; Kidman's character and her pathology are *way* too present. Her anxiety and awkwardness and risk-taking are all *horrible* to witness; her life is absolutely not anything that a (normal, healthy) woman would fantasize about experiencing. I felt tremendous compassion and pity and protectiveness for her throughout the movie because her pathological interior life was obviously *awful.* When she first orgasms with the intern, I felt a gentle happiness for her, not any desire to *be* her.
I felt that because that's what the director intended me to feel.
Just consider how that very long, unbroken shot of her orgasming could not be less porn-y. We-the-camera are laying down with her on that (obviously smelly) gross shitty hotel room carpet, only top part of her face and later just her forehead in focus, seeing nothing of her body, seeing nothing of his. At one point she anxiously worries she's going to accidentally pee (SO SEXY! EVERY WOMAN'S FANTASY FOR HER FIRST PARTNERED ORGASM!), and then she deeply, unsexily chest-grunts her way through orgasm, completely in contrast with the breathy porn whimpering she faked with her husband.
The casting of the intern was telling, too. He isn't traditionally good-looking for a reason; the intention was for only his *energy* to be highly attractive to (mostly only) Kidman's character, not to a general audience. The movie was extremely careful to depict him as young, working-class guy whose read of situations is occasionally wrong (renting that shitty hotel room!) and who hasn't developed any patter or polish or strategy as a "dominant." That was clear whenever he was trying to bluff through his uncertainty about what to do rather than confidently going with his instincts, and *let* *me* *tell* *you*, few things are less sexy to the average healthy submissive woman than a dominant's awkwardness and uncertainty. You don't make a point of putting those moments in a movie if you want women to fantasize about those moments.
So...yeah...Different Worlds, indeed! For me, and for the fellow kinkster woman I saw the movie with, the writer-director, Halina Reijn was SCREAMING at the audience, "this isn't for you to fantasize about!"
I'm just amazed that's not what you took away from it.
Sure, that's why it's interesting to talk to different people. Why *would* we take the same thing away from it? I'm a 45ish mostly-straight guy who's mostly topped and keeps trying to go vanilla because it's obviously rational to quit in a culture going feminist and conservative at the same time.
Maybe 'self-insertion fantasy' was the wrong phrase, because I think you are correct about the staging and casting and so on: her misery and anxiety and embarassment is exactly the self-insertion point. It's not a sexy self-insertion, it's an I-can-relate-to-this-person self-insertion, like all the crap they used to put heroes through in quest stories back when they actually made them for boys. 'Literally me' as the guys like to say. I am starting to think, on discussion with you, it's a quest story.
The idea I had is that she's like all the woke secretly-subby liberal ladies who write movie reviews for art movies (you may not be the *exact* target audience), so she's recapitulating their journey or the journey they'd like to take, being overpressured in a hectic job, balancing family and work demands (but see, she's a girlboss, so she's an aspirational figure too!), feeling guilty about these 'regressive' fantasies, and getting in a relationship with a younger guy (thus proving their attractiveness) before finally getting their husbands (who look like Antonio Banderas) to do (to them) what they want. (But you're still able to Put The Patriarchy In Its Place, and dispose of the unwanted boyfriend after the fact in Tokyo.)
You may not fantasize about the course of the movie, but you fantasize about someone like you having awkward experiences and *then* getting what you want...preserving the marriage and getting your kink while you're at it. It's supposed to be the girlboss's initiation into the life she wants, the initiation isn't supposed to be easy. There's a call to adventure, the dude's kind of a threshold guardian, there are trials, you even have that 'underworld' sequence where they go into the club and it's kind of dreamlike, and after a final confrontation between the dude and her husband, she returns to society, i.e. her marriage with the prize (confidence in her kink and a willing partner who looks like Antonio Banderas). It's a quest story, they're not fun while you're there, anymore than Indiana Jones enjoys dodging boulders.
If it were a more politically-correct 50 Shades of Grey with consent and safewords respected they couldn't have gone for 'character study' and so on. Of course apparently they got totally snubbed (except for Kidman) and it didn't work anyway.
I might give it a try. But I've had my fill of non-sexy sex-and-something-else for the time being and I wouldn't mind being entertained by sexy sex-and-something-else instead. For which I recommend Wild Things.
I read a bunch of them, but not very closely and like you should probably want lawyers to read and understand what several of the orders references "I stop bidens order blah blah, <trumps rants about what that did>" youd have to go read bidens order to actaully understand whats being said and I didnt even attempt to.
Why does it seem like *no one* is informed about them; at all, has jornalism fallen so much that you can find some interns are told to read 1/3rd each write up some summaries?
I've seen plenty of informed experts commenting on the orders under their purview on X and BlueSky. Might be worth searching on those platforms for commentary. Often it's in the form of "I work in X industry and this is what the Order means for me" or "I am a lawyer in X area, here is what this means".
People here might be interested to know: I just tried giving DeepSeek the official political compass test. I got rate limited about halfway through, so I don't have actual results, but most of the answers it gave were consistent with a moderate "lib left" viewpoint (the green square). It seemed to have stronger opinions (in the left direction) on economic questions compared to others, with the only exception being tariffs (it was in favor of tariffs).
Of particular interest here, I suspect, is the answer it gave for the proposition "land shouldn’t be a commodity to be bought and sold", which included the sentence "Policies that limit land commodification, such as community land trusts or land value taxes, can promote more equitable and sustainable land use, ensuring it serves the common good rather than private interests."
So there you have it. DeepSeek is Georgist.
Disclaimer: I was only using the "chat" version on their website (free tier), and I did not use a separate context window for each question due to laziness. The exact rate limit message was "You are sending messages too frequently. Please wait a moment before sending again."
Thanks for doing that! Wonder how much this is for public consumption.
I wouldn't be surprised if they produced it at least in part to tank the American stock market. Would be quite sensible from the geopolitical competition point of view (but then why tip their hand?) Certainly it's a big comedown for the USA, which thought it was ahead in all that stuff. I'd like to think it'd be our Sputnik moment, but I think the country's too far gone.
Has anyone done an analysis of the brewing tariff war with Canada yet?
I’m very surprised Canada has decided to retaliate dollar for dollar (which Trump has promised to double if they do) rather than negotiate whatever it is that’s actually motivating Trump to do this (explicitly it’s fentanyl and illegal border crossings, but who knows). I suspect he’d want a full reevaluation on specific industry subsidies and tariffs that Canada imposes on the US too.
Perhaps Trump isn’t willing to negotiate at all, which I don’t really buy, but is possible. The retaliation is doing “something” which is obviously demanded by the voters.
Canada is hugely dependent on US trade, and while Canadian tariffs on the US will cause harm, it will equally harm Canadian producers, and probably lead to even more tariffs imposed on them. For a country that has such a huge percent of its GDP tied up in trade with the US, I can’t see anything but a recession for Canada (and a minor decrease in GDP for the US).
All the analysis I’ve found are either saber rattling or what this means for the average consumer. I’m interesting in anyone who’s looking at the macroeconomic effects.
Trump has made it pretty clear what his intentions are. https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/113934520197790682
> We pay hundreds of Billions of Dollars to SUBSIDIZE Canada. Why? There is no reason. We don’t need anything they have. We have unlimited Energy, should make our own Cars, and have more Lumber than we can ever use. Without this massive subsidy, Canada ceases to exist as a viable Country. Harsh but true! Therefore, Canada should become our Cherished 51st State. Much lower taxes, and far better military protection for the people of Canada — AND NO TARIFFS!
Now, my own analysis of the situation. I am emphatically NOT going to stick to macroeconomics: I think your attempt to focus so heavily there is misleading you. Canada CANNOT look at this purely as an economic decision because it isn't. So the Canadian response will naturally factor in the economic realities, but also the diplomatic and political realities. Trump has, in an only-just-shy-of-literal-sense declared war on Canada[1] and Canada's response must be a *strategic* response: that is, the one that best serves all of Canada's strategic aims. Of course "maintaining Canada's economy" is obviously a major strategic aim, but so are "preserving Canada's national sovereignty" and "maintaining Canada's diplomatic position with the U.S. and the rest of the world," both of which are threatened by this move just as surely as the economy is.
First Point: negotiations require, well, actual negotiations. As outlined above, Trump doesn't seem to have made any attempt to negotiate with Canada at all. Likewise, Canada already made a quite large an expensive conciliatory move before Trump even took office. The only sense in which Canada could negotiate its way out of this situation is to *keep doing things like this* in the hopes that eventually Trump is satisfied and withdraws the threat. I hope I don't have to outline why this would be a fatally stupid way to operate. If Trump is threatening these tariffs as a way to get something (rather than imposing them because he thinks they're worthwhile in their own right) it's incumbent upon him to *at the bare minimum* ask for what he wants in concrete terms.
Second Point: reputational effects are real and important here. Every country is one player among many on the international state, and every country is on that stage for the long term. The actions you take today in one negotiation will affect the situation you face tomorrow and the next day, in future negotiations. Reputational effects are a very important component to both sides of this conflict. On Canada’s side, caving easily to U.S. pressure will today will lead rational actors to expect Canada to cave in similar fashion tomorrow. This could potentially cost a lot. Not only would Canada’s closest neighbor be made readily aware that in can extract concessions basically any time it wants by threatening Canada’s economy, but it could easily encourage other nations to try the same. This could be very, very costly for Canada in the long run, potentially much more so than the proposed tariffs. By contrast, the harder Canada hits back, the higher the apparent price tag it sets for anyone who wants to try this in the future. Trade wars tend to be enormously negative-sum: the U.S. might be better able to afford the hit, but it will still be a hit, which means the policy is less likely to be long-run profitable for the U.S. and less likely to be repeated.
On the U.S. side, even if Trump were to unilaterally back down on all his tariff threats tomorrow, he’s already damaged the U.S.’s international reputation. Actually imposing such tariffs on Canada will do greater and more lasting damage. The U.S. has remained the preeminent economic and diplomatic power in the world for 80 years in very large part by not doing stuff like this. While the U.S. can be imperious and demanding sometimes, it’s built up a very strong and very valuable reputation for being a good friend to have: it mostly presses the “cooperate” button and surrounds itself with other nations who tend to do the same. Everybody stays at peace, everybody trades reasonably nicely with everybody and as a result everybody gets rich. Short of declaring a shooting war, it’s difficult to imagine an action that U.S. could take that would be more damaging to that carefully-accumulated reputation than wantonly trying to wreck the economy of one of its oldest and closest allies over some comparatively minor domestic problems. Obviously the economic and diplomatic position of the U.S. are still central enough that this one act of aggression–however shocking–won’t trash it overnight. But it’s a crack in the foundation, and not a small one. Enough cracks will bring the house down, and even before then, there will be detrimental effects. This does connect strongly to the macroeconomic angle. Suppose you’re an investor being pitched an opportunity that heavily involves selling goods from abroad in the U.S. You just heard the news of the tariffs. Did that increase your eagerness to invest or decrease it? Even if none of the goods are coming from Canada, these threats are a really sharp demonstration that anyone could be Trump’s next target. All business ventures that require interacting with the U.S. market are suddenly looking a little more volatile than they did a week ago, or three weeks ago or a year ago. Volatility carries risk and hedging against risk costs money. My macroeconomics knowledge isn’t strong enough to estimate how large this effect will be–my guess is that as a one-off it will be lost in the noise–but if things like this keep happening, it's difficult to imagine that it won’t start to impose a real, significant drag on the U.S. economy. A lot of people with significant business connections in the U.S. have got to be evaluating their other options and researching other suppliers and/or consumers right now. And while they’re a little more abstract, I expect diplomatic effects in a similar vein: U.S. guarantees of cooperation and friendship (be they on trade, defense, intelligence or anything else) just got a little more questionable. Negotiators will be a little bit less willing to align with U.S. diplomatic priorities if this is wage that two centuries of steady friendship buys U.S. allies.
Third Point: the internal politics of both countries also real and important factors. Saving the best for last, this is (in my opinion) the factor that I most expect to prove decisive. Certainly a trade war with the U.S. will cause far greater economic damage to Canada–as a fraction of GDP–than it will cause to the U.S. But the political effects will be much, much less lopsided. As far as I can tell[2], the general mood among Canadians right now is that we are under attack, and that we need to stand up and defend ourselves. Meanwhile calling the general mood among those in the U.S. “divided” would be a massive understatement. Tens of millions of Americans were already angry and horrified at the conduct of the new administration before Saturday’s announcement, and this will not make them any calmer or any less determined to push back against the government they oppose. Meanwhile, how many people even among those that voted for Trump actually want him to plunge them into a trade war with Canada? I got the sense that a lot of what secured Trump his win was economic hardship and anxiety. An action that increases prices U.S. consumers pay while hurting a significant share of U.S. businesses (all done in the service of fairly nebulous objectives) seems unlikely to sit well with at least some of those people. To be fair, Trump proved himself both very stubborn and essentially immune to negative news headlines during his first term, but actions that his millions of Americans directly in the pocket book might well be harder for him to shrug off. If the trade war creates solidarity on the Canadian side, while sowing division and galvanizing organized opposition on the U.S. side, it seems very possible that the U.S.’s political will cracks before Canada’s does, despite the lopsided economic impact. If that happens, then the U.S. loses doubly hard: it damages its own economy and reputation without getting anything in return. Trade War: the only winning move is not to play.
[1] Or if you like, announced an intent to declare war, with the actual declaration scheduled for Tuesday.
[2] Which, to be fair, is not all that far. I’ve only had a chance to talk to a few people about it, and they’ve been mostly people whose views align with my own in other ways.
> Suppose you’re an investor being pitched an opportunity that heavily involves selling goods from abroad in the U.S. You just heard the news of the tariffs. Did that increase your eagerness to invest or decrease it?
Well, here's what Trump has to say about that:
> MAKE YOUR PRODUCT IN THE USA AND THERE ARE NO TARIFFS!
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/113934450227067577
My request that you not reply to me was not time or post limited. The intent was that I don't want to talk to you any time, on any post, ever.
This is a great illustration of why. I have neither the patience nor the pedagogical experience to explain to you what political cheerleading doesn't actually map to real-world economic outcomes; the attempt would probably be quite unpleasant for all involved. If you posted your opinions as a reply to the top-level thread, you'd be more likely to find someone able to hand-hold you across the apparently-vast gap in understanding.
...Mate, I was just letting you know what Trump's aims were. Investing in other countries isn't going to be a viable option when the global supply chain is in tatters, so they may as well move operations to the US. And he will burn the whole world down just to make this happen. Did you think "America First" was just a bluff? His ambitions are real, and now he has the power to fulfill them.
I mean, he really really doesn't understand how economy works? Forget the fancy word "economy", how, for example, manufacturing business works, or who it is that pays the tariffs. At this point it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, and it has been doing this for a long time, so an inescapable conclusion is that Trump is a clueless dolt with a sadistic streak.
As if we didn't know this. But.
Does the Dane Geld metaphor fit this scenario with the US as the Danes? Can game theory inform Canada and Mexico's actions? Trump seems like a defect-bot sometimes.
> rather than negotiate whatever it is that’s actually motivating Trump to do this
...I highly doubt that Canada is going to let the US annex them without a fight.
First some facts that you seem to be unaware of. I'll write my own thoughts and opinions about the tariffs and the impending trade war in a separate comment.
First, Canada already released a plan to put an additional $1.3 billion to strengthen its border security. This was after the election but well before the inauguration, so it seems to be pretty clearly a response to Trump's threats and concerns and something offered up preemptively, as an olive branch. It strongly suggests a willingness to be accommodating on this issue (within reason):
https://www.canada.ca/en/public-safety-canada/news/2024/12/government-of-canada-announces-its-plan-to-strengthen-border-security-and-our-immigration-system.html
Second, if Trump is trying to hold actual negotiations here, I haven't seen evidence of it. You say
"Perhaps Trump isn’t willing to negotiate at all, which I don’t really buy, but is possible."
but as far as I can tell his does seem to be the case. Trudeau has signaled interest in negotiation and (according to him) received no response:
"Trudeau said he's been trying to reach Trump since his inauguration two weeks ago but hasn't heard back. He said he wants to relay to Trump that it's better to tackle challenges such as drugs and migrants together as partners rather than as combatants in a trade dispute." (Source: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trump-tariffs-canada-february-1-1.7447829 )
Of course, there's one more day until the tariffs take effect: this could be a deliberate ploy to apply as much pressure as possible to try to force more concessions when the negotiation does happen. We'll know in 48 hours at the most.
UPDATE: I saw later that Trump's lack of intent to negotiate has been confirmed from his side as well:
"'We're not looking for a concession,' Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday. 'We'll see what happens.'" (Source: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-tariff-north-america-analysis-1.7447878)
Could still be a bluff, of course. But there do seem to be indications that Trump thinks this is a good in itself, intending to try to force foreign industries to move to the U.S. Which is to say that it seems Trump's ideology is at odds with sound economic policy, and neither the good of the U.S. population nor the U.S.'s diplomatic position are primary drivers of his decision making.
I think you’re making a mistake in analyzing Canadian tariffs—they’re not targeting the US Economy, they’re targeting specific states, specific industries and the Senators who care about them. Bad news for Tennessee whiskey, for example.
Anybody following what DOGE is doing so far? I see Elon claiming to be close to reducing $4 billion spend per day, but not sure I can believe his hyperbole. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1885574678737039823
Any good rationalist writeups on this so far?
He seems to be trying to shut down a whole agency, USAID. If he can do that, and it stands, we’re in a different form of government and the old assumptions are no longer valid.
Yeah. At the moment it seems like the plan is "get admin access to systems that handle money and personnel, physically stop the money from being spent." You can definitely cut a lot of spending that way if you're willing to break the law!
$4B/day works out to $1.46T/year. Total discretionary spending (i.e. stuff that Trump can legally block by vetoing appropriations bills, as opposed to mandatory spending which requires Congress to vote to amend or repeal existing laws), including defense spending, is about $1.6T.
Also worth noting, cutting discretionary spending without the cooperation of majorities of both houses of Congress is hard, since Congress can put the stuff you want to keep in the same bill as the stuff you want to cut.
I see a few possibilities:
1. Musk has no idea how much he realistically can try to cut and is saying arbitrary large numbers like Doctor Evil.
2. Musk also hopes to make deep cuts to mandatory spending. This runs heavily contrary to Trump's previous statements about never cutting Social Security and Medicare, and requires active participation by Congress not just vetoing bills and winning standoffs about passing bills with just the discretionary spending you want to keep.
3. Musk actually wants to disband almost the entire discretionary side of the Federal government, including the military.
4. Musk wants to raise a ton of one-time revenue by selling off a ton of federal land and similar assets and is counting this as part of the $4B/day figure.
1 and 4 strike me as the most likely.
Theres an executive order for 4 people per department to be hired; I dont even know if people are following when that will be finished
There are many similar videos, but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoYQdfhy24k this was interesting. The channel is an Ukrainian guy interviewing random Russians in video calls.
This lady, she is really happy about Russia destroying Ukrainian borders, because her country is always right, whatever it does; she supports Russia unconditionally. Also, she doesn't understand why Ukrainians are not friendlier with Russians; why are they looking towards the West instead.
She supports Putin in "almost everything". What is "almost"? Well, she is sad that many of her friends have recently died in the war against Ukraine. (She lives in Siberia, most of those people have previously never been in Moscow or Ukraine.) But other than this little detail, she is a strong Putin supporter.
...people are different, I guess?
Isn't nationalism such a beautiful thing? How would we accomplish anything if it was impossible to cultivate a legion of such unwaveringly loyal soldiers?
...Which is also why allowing such high standards of living is counterproductive to the interests of the collective. We cannot allow people to find meaning in life outside of faith. They must be made willing to give anything and everything. One for all, all for one.
It's not the nationalism I found surprising (although it does not appeal to me), but rather how the lady is puzzled that the people she hates *don't love her country* in turn.
There are many nationalists in my country too, but I have never heard them wondering why the nations they hate are not friendlier towards them. They see *mutual* hate as the natural state of the world; they might be surprised to learn that many of the people they hate actually don't even think about them.
Does the lady perhaps believe that Russian nationalism is so great that even the non-Russians should naturally embrace it (and that it is quite surprising if they don't)?
Does she perhaps believe that the natural state of the world is that deep down in their hearts all people around the world desire to be conquered by Russia, and then go die for the glory of Russia trying to conquer even more countries? (Just like she is proud for supporting Moscow that her Siberian friends died for.)
To me it seems like this... Ruscism... is way crazier than the usual nationalism. The usual nationalism is "we hate them, naturally they *hate* us too"; Ruscism seems to be "we hate them, and we don't understand why they don't *love* us".
If she's been drinking the Russian Propaganda Kool-Aid, she very likely believes that the territory in question is part of "Russia" and has been for a thousand years, that almost all of the people who live there are "Russians", and that "Ukrainian" is a word invented by a handful of corrupt Nazis in Kyiv to justify their ongoing oppression of forty million "Russians".
If she hasn't been drinking the Russian Propaganda Kool-Aid, she's probably not available to answer questions from inquisitive journalists.
The belief that one's soldiers will be welcomed as liberators when they march uninvited into someone else's country, is a common error not at all limited to Russians or even to subjects of authoritarian regimes generally.
> There are many nationalists in my country too, but I have never heard them wondering why the nations they hate are not friendlier towards them
Of course, because those nations are filled with savages. They understand there is no common ground to be had with them. It's different when two civilized nations are at war. The west has forgotten what that's like, but that will probably change soon enough.
tl;dr: ChatGPT o3-mini 01/31/2025 7 questions results:
2 correct, 4 partially correct, 1 badly wrong EDIT: _see next comment for a significant correction_
Overall: Just about the same as o1, no significant progress.
Backing off guess about AGI to 70% odds in 3 years. (was 80% in 2 years)
a) Correct
b) partially correct (got the species right, got FeCl4 right, got the d-d transition in CuCl4 wrong, took multiple leading questions to correct it)
c) partially correct (three errors)
d) correct
e) initially incorrect, one prod gave correct result
f) misses a lot, argues incorrectly that some real gases are liquids
g) badly wrong
List of questions and results:
a) Q: Is light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm visible to the human eye?
results: https://chatgpt.com/share/679d390d-3140-8006-a5ed-ec924f7c1729
Correct: "Yes, light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm is visible to the human eye. The visible spectrum for humans typically ranges from about 380 nm to 750 nm, and 530 nm falls within that range, corresponding to green light."
b) Q: I have two solutions, one of FeCl3 in HCl in water, the other of CuCl2 in HCl in water. They both look approximately yellowish brown. What species in the two solutions do you think give them the colors they have, and why do these species have the colors they do?
results: https://chatgpt.com/share/679d3c68-6010-8006-abc9-14a365fa8527
A bit worse than o1. It kept insisting that CuCl4's color was from a d-d transition, and it took a bunch of leading questions to get it to see that it was really charge transfer.
c) Q: Please pretend to be a professor of chemistry and answer the following question: Please list all the possible hydrocarbons with 4 carbon atoms.
results: https://chatgpt.com/share/679d40dc-352c-8006-9137-2ab3b860f429
Disappointing. It did get the two methylcyclopropene isomer on the first try, which o1 missed, but it missed tetrahedrane, vinylacetylene, and diacetylene. It omitted a bunch of highly strained rings, which is sort-of ok, since it said it was skipping them.
d) Q: Does the Sun lose more mass per second to the solar wind or to the mass equivalent of its radiated light?
results: https://chatgpt.com/share/679d44bd-b078-8006-aef3-9284ea068b2c
Correct, "This comparison shows that the mass equivalent of the Sun’s radiated energy is about four times greater than the mass lost via the solar wind."
e) Q: Consider a titration of HCl with NaOH. Suppose that we are titrating 50 ml of 1 N HCl with 100 ml of 1 N NaOH. What are the slopes of the titration curve, pH vs ml NaOH added, at the start of titration, at the equivalence point, and at the end of titration? Please show your work. Take this step by step, showing the relevant equations you use.
results: https://chatgpt.com/share/679d499a-ca1c-8006-8af7-84c95892f771
Basically the same as for o1. It gave an initially wrong answer, with an infinite slope at the equivalence point. Given one hint, it got a fully correct answer.
f) Q: Please give me an exhaustive list of the elements and inorganic compounds that are gases at STP. By STP, I mean 1 atmosphere pressure and 0C. By inorganic, I mean that no atoms of carbon should be present. Exclude CO2, CO, freons and so on. Please include uncommon compounds. I want an exhaustive list. There should be roughly 50 compounds. For each compound, please list its name, formula, and boiling or sublimation point.
results: https://chatgpt.com/share/679d51b7-6a24-8006-a3e8-ccabd2cd9691
About the same as for o1. It stops listing at 50 compounds, presumably because of my mistake in asking for roughly 50 compounds (should really be around 100, from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gases. It is quite stubborn about adding to the
list, e.g. PF5 is a gas and it took quite a bit of prompting for it to accept this, and
accept the right boiling point number from e.g. the NIST reference.
g) Q: What is an example of a molecule that has an S4 rotation-reflection axis, but neither a center of inversion nor a mirror plane?
results: https://chatgpt.com/share/679d576c-7ee4-8006-841d-ca22572bc7a8
Badly wrong. It gave three examples, none of which had an S4 but no center of inversion or mirror plane. The first two didn't have an S4 at all.
tl;dr: ChatGPT o3-mini-high 02/01/2025 7 questions results:
3 correct, 4 partially correct
Overall: One better than o1, hoped for more progress
Backing off guess about AGI to 70% odds in 2 years. (was 80% in 2 years)
I want to note that o3-mini-high and o3-mini are not very different, though it was still a mistake for me to initially test o3-mini rather than o3-mini-high. The _larger_ change is that I misunderstood both LLM's answer to (g), the S4 question. It actually _is_ correct for both LLMs (and was _not_ correct for o1), so there actually has been progress on this benchmark-ette since o1, though less than I hoped for.
a) Correct
b) partially correct (got the species right, got FeCl4 right, got the d-d transition in CuCl4 wrong, took multiple leading questions to correct it)
c) partially correct (two errors)
d) correct
e) initially incorrect, one prod gave correct result
f) misses a lot, argues incorrectly that some real gases are liquids
g) correct (needed to clarify what it meant to me!)
List of questions and results:
a) Q: Is light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm visible to the human eye?
results: https://chatgpt.com/share/679e70b6-2e6c-8006-a7ff-3a6725327f63
Correct: "Yes, light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm is visible to the human eye. The human visible spectrum generally ranges from about 380 nm to 750 nm, and wavelengths around 530 nm are typically perceived as green.
While the number provided is extremely precise, this level of precision far exceeds what our eyes can distinguish, but it confirms that the light falls well within the visible range."
b) Q: I have two solutions, one of FeCl3 in HCl in water, the other of CuCl2 in HCl in water. They both look approximately yellowish brown. What species in the two solutions do you think give them the colors they have, and why do these species have the colors they do?
results: https://chatgpt.com/share/679e7a17-4dd4-8006-b2bd-a0fd43e86ba0
A bit worse than o1. It kept insisting that CuCl4's color was from a d-d transition..
c) Q: Please pretend to be a professor of chemistry and answer the following question: Please list all the possible hydrocarbons with 4 carbon atoms.
results: https://chatgpt.com/share/679e7d20-88dc-8006-a4c6-cdbde11a57dd
Meh. It _did_ get tetrahedrane, vinylacetylene, and diacetylene, but it missed the two methylcylopropenes until poked.
It omitted a bunch of highly strained rings, which is sort-of ok, since it said it was skipping them.
d) Q: Does the Sun lose more mass per second to the solar wind or to the mass equivalent of its radiated light?
results: https://chatgpt.com/share/679e7f3d-0c50-8006-935d-f346fef7c9eb
Correct, " In other words, the mass loss from radiation is roughly 6–7 times greater than that from the solar wind."
e) Q: Consider a titration of HCl with NaOH. Suppose that we are titrating 50 ml of 1 N HCl with 100 ml of 1 N NaOH. What are the slopes of the titration curve, pH vs ml NaOH added, at the start of titration, at the equivalence point, and at the end of titration? Please show your work. Take this step by step, showing the relevant equations you use.
results: https://chatgpt.com/share/679e840d-a464-8006-b4bc-5474733316a2
Basically the same as for o1. It gave an initially wrong answer, with an infinite slope at the equivalence point. Given one hint, it got a fully correct answer.
f) Q: Please give me an exhaustive list of the elements and inorganic compounds that are gases at STP. By STP, I mean 1 atmosphere pressure and 0C. By inorganic, I mean that no atoms of carbon should be present. Exclude CO2, CO, freons and so on. Please include uncommon compounds. I want an exhaustive list. There should be roughly 50 compounds. For each compound, please list its name, formula, and boiling or sublimation point.
results: https://chatgpt.com/share/679e8f66-7658-8006-a125-f9dbeff6ea1d
About the same as for o1. It stops listing at 50 compounds, presumably because of my mistake in asking for roughly 50 compounds (should really be around 100, from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gases. It is willing to add some compounds to the list.
g) Q: What is an example of a molecule that has an S4 rotation-reflection axis, but neither a center of inversion nor a mirror plane?
results: https://chatgpt.com/share/679e93b5-fdd4-8006-ad89-c61ef4f30345
correct! It actually has a geometry for the M(en)2 case where a staggered geometry for the en ligands winds up satisfying all the requirements.
I've seen the announcement of OpenAI's o3-deep-research system,
https://openai.com/index/introducing-deep-research/
I don't yet have access to it (a month away for my tier, if I understand correctly), so I don't know how well it will perform on my questions.
In the announcement, OpenAI described an impressive improvement on https://lastexam.ai/ from
OpenAI o3-mini (high)* 13.0% right (it is a _very_ hard exam)
to
OpenAI deep research** 26.6% right
On the strength of that improvement, I'm bumping up my
guess about AGI back up to 80% odds in 2 years. (was 70% after seeing o3-mini-high)
ACXLW Meetup 85 1) “Bureaucracy Isn’t Measured in Bureaucrats” & 2) “How the US Used Science to Wage Psychological War”
Date: Saturday, February 1, 2025
Time: 2:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place, Newport Beach, CA 92660
Host: Michael Michalchik
Contact: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com | (949) 375-2045
Introduction and Overview
This session features two distinct topics that converge around the theme of how bureaucratic or institutional influence shapes policy and public perception:
Scott Alexander’s article explores the nature of administrative and legal friction—how it really works, why simply “firing half the bureaucrats” might backfire, and how incentives around litigation and Congressional mandates drive ever-increasing complexity in agencies like the FDA.
Annalee Newitz’s piece delves into the long history of U.S. psychological warfare, from 19th-century anthropologists on the battlefield to modern data-driven influence campaigns. It examines how government agencies (and sometimes private industry) harness “cutting-edge science” to manipulate or influence minds—both abroad and at home.
These conversations should deepen our understanding of how large institutions, whether civil or military, can become unwieldy or wield profound power over society’s direction—often in subtle, behind-the-scenes ways.
Conversation Starter 1
Topic: “Bureaucracy Isn’t Measured in Bureaucrats” by Scott Alexander
Text Link:
Bureaucracy Isn't Measured In Bureaucrats
Audio Link (YouTube):
Bureaucracy Isn't Measured In Bureaucrats
Extended Summary
In this article, Scott Alexander responds to a now-deleted Vivek Ramaswamy tweet calling for “firing half of all bureaucrats” as a quick cure for the ills of red tape. Alexander argues that bureaucracy is not a simple function of staff count. Instead, layers of regulations, court challenges, and Congressional mandates (often called “red tape”) create mandatory processes. These processes remain the same, or even grow, regardless of how many employees are available to handle them. Fewer staff doesn’t necessarily reduce forms or procedures; it simply slows them down.
Key Points:
Staff vs. Process
Many agencies (like the FDA) have to produce exhaustive evidence to avoid lawsuits from interest groups or industry. This complexity is set by laws and court precedent, not by the whim of office managers. Halving staff doesn’t remove steps; it just delays the outcome.
Court Challenges & Legislative Mandates
Environmental groups, industries, or other stakeholders can sue. Courts require thorough justification for any regulatory decision, incentivizing agencies to produce reams of documentation. Meanwhile, each new law from Congress adds a fresh compliance dimension.
Approval vs. Ban-Focused Bureaucracies
Alexander notes a subtlety: some agencies primarily “approve” (e.g. FDA letting new drugs come to market) while others primarily “deny” (some forms of regulation). In theory, cutting staff for ban-focused bureaucracies might reduce how much they can ban—but in practice, it can as easily cause confusion or slow attempts to regulate or un-regulate.
Real Solutions
Alexander distinguishes “fewer bureaucrats” from “fewer or simpler rules.” Real changes might require rolling back laws that drive administrative sprawl or limiting the ability to sue over regulatory decisions. However, these are politically complex tasks, far more so than layoffs.
Idaho as a Counterexample?
He cites Idaho’s recent success in slashing many outdated regulations. But, he wonders, how many of these cuts were cosmetic (e.g. “rules about a nonexistent state lottery TV show”) vs. impactful? The path to meaningful red tape reduction may require painstaking reviews and legislative changes—things that can’t be solved by a single stroke.
Deep Discussion Questions
Processes vs. People:
Alexander suggests that if you want fewer hoops, you need to change the hoops, not just the number of staff. Do you see real-world scenarios where staff cuts do reduce bureaucratic friction, or is it mostly naive to conflate the two?
Legal Overhang & Fear of Lawsuits:
How does the constant threat of litigation shape agency decision-making? Are there ways to prevent excessive lawsuits without undermining checks on government power?
Idaho’s Experiment:
Is Idaho’s success scalable? Could a large federal agency realistically prune decades of accumulated mandates as quickly? Or are the politics (and inertia) insurmountable?
Reform Approaches:
Alexander highlights that the real culprit is the complex web of regulations mandated by Congress or the courts. If meaningful red-tape reform is the true solution, where might such a campaign gain traction? And are we prepared for the possible downsides (e.g., under-regulation)?
Conversation Starter 2
Topic: “How the US Used Science to Wage Psychological War” by Annalee Newitz
Text Link:
Full Article by Annalee Newitz
Optional Extra Reading:
Wikipedia: Psychological Operations (United States)
(No audio link provided.)
Extended Summary
Annalee Newitz’s essay tracks the long history of U.S. “psy ops” (psychological operations)—from rudimentary 18th-century propaganda to advanced 21st-century digital campaigns. She contends that while many countries have engaged in psychological warfare, the U.S. has carved out a distinctive approach by blending “cutting-edge science” with political and cultural infiltration. Key eras illustrate how the government’s “rational approach” to propaganda draws on anthropology, psychology, marketing, and advanced analytics:
19th-Century Roots: Anthropologists on the Battlefield
The U.S. Army employed anthropologists during wars with Indigenous nations. Their mission included cataloging cultures and languages—ostensibly for academic study but functionally to facilitate conquest. This early synergy between science and warfare sowed seeds for modern psy ops.
World Wars & Freudian Marketing
Psy ops came into its own in the 20th century, relying on psychological theories to produce “rationally designed” propaganda. Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, exemplified this marriage of marketing acumen with intelligence services, orchestrating (or aiding) campaigns like the CIA-backed coup in Guatemala.
Modern Digital Spin-Offs
In the 21st century, data-driven “psychographic profiles” (as seen in the Cambridge Analytica scandal) or social media infiltration have replaced old-school leaflets and radio broadcasts. Instead of sending anthropologists to foreign battlefields, advanced AI or big-data analytics “map” human vulnerabilities—at scale.
Blurred Lines
Newitz notes that “psy ops” can loop back into domestic spheres. Culture wars, shaping news cycles, or quiet infiltration of a population’s worldview straddles the boundary between international propaganda and domestic persuasion. She highlights how the “rational approach” has moral hazards—once the state gains deep insight into cognition, it can more easily manipulate or mislead.
Efforts at Resistance
Some researchers propose transparency or “propaganda weather reports,” akin to forecast services that warn users about upcoming influence spikes on social media. Others preserve historical archives to reveal patterns of government infiltration. Despite these attempts, a robust strategy to quell psychological warfare remains elusive.
Deep Discussion Questions
Old-School vs. Digital Psy Ops:
From leaflets and embedded anthropologists to AI-driven manipulations, how has the core logic of controlling narratives stayed the same, and what’s truly new?
Ethical Boundaries:
Is there ever a justified “psy ops” campaign, especially if it’s used to avert harm or defuse extremist narratives? How do we reconcile the possibility of protective or “noble” misinformation?
Science as Double-Edged Sword:
Anthropological and psychological studies can yield legitimate insight into human cultures—but also enable powerful exploitation. Where should the lines be drawn? Are certain forms of research inherently prone to weaponization?
Domestic Overlap:
Although Newitz focuses on how the U.S. turned these techniques outward, modern controversies (e.g., Cambridge Analytica) show that lines blur easily. Should governments categorically ban “psy ops” on domestic citizens, or is that unenforceable in a networked age?
Walk & Talk
After exploring these themes, we’ll do our usual one-hour walk around the neighborhood. This more casual time fosters spontaneous questions, deeper connections, and fresh perspectives.
Share a Surprise
We’ll also have an “open-floor” segment: if you’ve read any eye-opening articles, had a perspective-altering personal experience, or discovered a fascinating fact, feel free to share. Varied topics are welcome.
Looking Ahead
As always, feel free to propose future topics or volunteer to host a specific reading. Our group thrives on diverse expertise, so if you have a focus—be it technology, policy, history, or beyond—we encourage you to bring it forward.
We Look Forward to Seeing You on February 1!
Questions, clarifications, or special requests? Contact Michael Michalchik (info above). Thanks for being part of ACXLW—together we’ll keep exploring the frontiers of thought, policy, and culture. See you soon!
First aerial collision in I think 17 years today, after our glorious leader (Musk, in this case) paused hiring, fired a bunch of people, and generally started kicking down chestertons fence because it was woke.
I wonder how many stupid things you can do in a row as a conservative before people realize that they're stupid, it doesn't seem like there's an upper limit. Sad.
Having listened to the recordings it seems like nothing can be attributed to recent policy. Both the Helicopter and the Plane were following established procedure, there wasn’t a shortage of staff, and the ATC didn’t do anything wrong so far as directing things.
It looks like this was a decently known tight airspace, the helicopter confirmed they had the incoming plane in sight, then flew right into its path. The most likely situation is the helicopter pilot was looking at the wrong plane, probably the following one, and didn’t notice the plane they were supposed to have in sight and avoided.
It’s a flaw in the system, but a decently common thing in aviation to avoid another aircraft by sight, when you have it in sight. I wouldn’t be surprised if this pilot was less experienced than they should have been, as it’s a pretty obvious thing to mistake one incoming aircraft for another on final, as there’s usually many in a row.
The "wasn't a shortage of staff" part is open to dispute considering that the helo and local control positions were combined. The outcome could have been quite different if instead of just "do you have the CRJ in sight?" the helicopter pilot had heard something like "traffic alert, the CRJ now 11 o'clock and a mile and a half turning short final for 33, appears targets will merge. Verify you've still got him." Saying all that would have taken time the local controller didn't have-- but a split-off helo controller would have.
Admittedly we don't know whether the positions were combined because staffing was short, or because the supervisor decided to send an extra body to the break room. That's one of the things the NTSB will have to look into.
It would be better to say: there wasn’t a shortage of staff due to recent policy. I wasn’t aware there was ever a split off helo controller, but I assume that’s more common at heavily trafficked airports.
We’re almost half a century into an ATC staff shortage and still going strong.
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-a-quick-overview
According to Trace, DEI has been scuffing the FAA's hiring pipeline for decades. (Notice how the article was published on Jan 29, 2024. I.e. 12 months ago. He's not just knee-jerk reacting to the recent crash.)
I'll admit that my "Musk is just an honest idealist" take aged like fine milk. (Although in my defense, ketamine is a hell of a drug.) But idk if we can lay this one at Musk's feet. At least not until more information about the crash becomes available.
No, according to Trace, there was a serious fuckup from 2014-2016 (in 2016, Congress passed a law banning the use of biographical assessments as a first line measure, as noted in the article you linked), and it was completely discontinued in 2018. Not "decades".
https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1885695823524016564
It probably had a negative impact on total ATCs - eight years ago! The crashes are happening now!
Yeah, that's fair. I was going off memory. I could have sworn the article mentioned a date from the 00's. But on closer inspection, the "2000" date was simply when the task-force was first commissioned.
edit: However, Trace's tweet does mention that the hiring-pipeline is still damaged. So I don't think I'm completely crazy for Trace's article having influenced my priors about the cause.
It seems a bit early in the Trump administration to blame this event on them. They just haven't had time to do much yet.
It might make more sense to blame Congress, which last year voted to increase the number of flights permitted at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, when the airspace around it is already very congested.
https://www.newsweek.com/lawmakers-voted-increase-flights-reagan-airport-crash-2023484
Agreed. There are some *potentially* legitimate political and culture-war issues that may have been at work here but A: it's too early in the investigation to know and B: it's too early in the new administration for anything they've done to seriously affect ATC operations on the ground. Anyone suggesting that it is obvious who is at fault here, should be ignored.
Shall we ask Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) for comment?
https://www.congress.gov/amendment/118th-congress/senate-amendment/2064/text
I agree that waiting and seeing what the investigation says before assigning blame is a good idea.
You know who didn't do that? Donald Trump, who took less than 24 hours to sign an EO saying it was Biden's fault for supporting DEI.
Based on the reporting I'm seeing, I'm at 70% confidence it will turn out to be the fault of the Blackhawk.
We don't have the blackbox data yet, but we do have the traffic control audio, and the tower clearly identifies the AA flight (a CRJ-700) for the helicopter crew, who confirm that they see it. Transcript below- PA 2-5 is the Blackhawk:
Air Traffic Control: “PAT 2-5 do you have the CRJ in sight?”
Air Traffic Control: “PAT 2-5 pass behind the CRJ.”
Blackhawk Crew: “PAT 2-5 has aircraft in sight, request visual separation.”
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/30/us/maps-plane-helicopter-crash-dca-dg/index.html
"Visual separation" (see article below) "means the pilot acknowledges seeing the incoming aircraft and is informing the air traffic controller that they will avoid getting too close to the plane."
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/30/nx-s1-5281166/dca-crash-helicopter-air-traffic-controller-radio
So, to my lay-eyes, it looks like the tower did its job and warned the helicopter about the airliner, gave them a clear instruction to pass behind it, and received confirmation that the helicopter saw and intended to avoid getting close to the plane, only to have something go wrong on the helicopter side of the equation.
Lots of ways that could have happened; medical emergency or other failure in the helicopter cockpit, helicopter crew was actually looking at a different aircraft and thus *didn't* see the CRJ despite reporting that they did, etc. But it seems like evidence so far indicates that whatever went wrong was most likely on the helicopter side of the equation.
If the BH is confirming visual and intent to avoid, why would they say "requesting visual separation" instead of "maintaining visual separation" or "will maintain visual separation"?
That bit bugs me a little because it suggests a possible miscommunication. (Or it might be nothing or just normal aviation jargon I'm not familiar with, but I doubt it, since I understand ATC procedure as wanting to be so clear that even people finding themselves in control of aircraft in an emergency (e.g. pilot had a stroke, no one else on the craft) can understand it as plain English.)
If the BH crew actually saw a different aircraft, then that's a strong signal to me that "visual" is no longer going to be good enough, at least at Reagan.
What's the chance there was a drone in the vicinity, mistaken as something else?
I read "requesting visual separation" as requesting "permission" to use visual separation to keep their distance, rather than an alternative method of avoiding collision such as direction by the tower.
I.e. the BH says "requesting visual separation" and the tower then responds by (a) granting permission to use visual separation to avoid the CRJ, or (b) denying permission to rely on visual and instead directing the BH to a particular spot out of the way of the aircraft.
But as stated, I'm very much a layperson so YMMV by a lot with respect to that interpretation.
Manifold, Polymarket, and Metaculus all have >50% chance of RFK Jr. being confirmed.
https://manifold.markets/agucova/will-rfk-jr-be-confirmed-as-secreta - 75%
https://polymarket.com/event/how-many-senators-vote-to-confirm-rfk-as-secretary-of-hhs?tid=1738282006967 - 65% at 50+ Senators (Vance would cast tiebreaker, like for Hegseth)
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/30444/ - 92%
"Our job is to resist and to talk about it to everybody. If you’re walking down the street – and I do this now myself, which is, you know, I don’t want to do – I’m not a busybody. I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get him vaccinated.’ And he heard that from me. If he hears it from 10 other people, maybe he won’t do it, you know, maybe he will save that child." - RFK Jr, 11:35 of this podcast: https://sites.libsyn.com/311600/rfk-jr
This is really bad. I can't even make a joke about it. He will just kill children if elected to this post. Anyone who would say that paragraph should not be allowed into public office, much less put in charge of the HHS. Please, write your Senators - even Republicans don't want a bunch of American kids to die of measles.
I can't see why even Trump would want RFK Jr as health secretary. He did his job, which was to drop out and endorse Trump in exchange for a promised nomination to a cabinet position.
RFK Jr has his own weird agenda orthogonal to Trump's, and I can't see why Trump would actually want him in that position.
The weird agenda got a lot of supporters during COVID (even though Trump actually did a lot of work to get a COVID vaccine out as quickly as possible). RFK appeals to that chunk of his base - the "we don't need the government to protect us from disease, we just need horse paste and a tough attitude" crowd.
Possibly Trump is the sort of person wants to surround himself with lickspittle lackeys that owe everything to him, since he is at the center of a personality cult and has convinced himself that the only problem with his previous administration is too many people had principles and/or competence that made them sometimes butt heads with him.
Alternately, he is antivaxx himself. Thus his quite notorious Tweet where he said, "Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn't feel good and changes - AUTISM. Many such cases!"
Anyone have a guess about what will happen with Trump's campaign of tariff threats? I expect he will be able to get a lot of smaller countries to give in, but will run into trouble when he tries it with one of the parties strong enough to push back effectively, meaning China or the EU. This will spark a trade war of retaliatory tariffs, which will generate a nasty recession. That will produce enough misery that in the following election in the US the Dems will win back congress, and they'll make him stop. That might be in 2026, if things develop quickly.
I don't even think it's meant to be a special punitive measure. I mean, it's phrased that way since basically everything in the new US admin is phrased as someone getting punished, but really, Trump's mindset just seems to be that tariffs are a positive good in themselves and the normal status of how things are that US has tariffs against here, there and everywhere, to protect US industry and to collect money (in lieu of using income taxes), as he has said many times.
We're so used to a free trade world where tariffs are a punitive expection (not an infrequent expection to be sure, but still, something that by definition has to be conceived as an expection) that this sort of a mindset starts to seem quite alien to us, even though the world being riddled with tariffs and duties used to be the standard setting to be cleared away by the free trade revolution. The free trade revolution was mostly good and this is bad, but it's also not a special form of bad but rather a very traditional sort of bad.
It's worth noting that he can manually grant exemptions to tariffs, meaning he can use it as a way to indirectly punish companies that turn against him.
It’s also likely that the tariffs start a trade war that continues for years and hurts everybody, because there is no way to ratchet it down smoothly in a multi-lateral world and these things take on a life of their own, note how Biden continued and extended many of Trump’s policies towards China. The worst case scenario is very bad here.
I think it might depend on what the rest of the world is led to expect from America after 2028. If Trump seems like a parenthesis and the likely upcoming leaders are anxious to mend fences, I believe many countries (or nominal allies) will be only too eager to drop the retaliatory tariffs. Tariffs on China are probably here to stay, though.
Re: defense journal/magazine. War on the Rocks (not sure if they're a journal or a magazine, tbqh) feels like the place that might publish something like that. Here's their submissions guidelines. https://warontherocks.com/submissions/
Those of you who like your violence extra spicy may be interested in the teaser trailer for Astartes II, which just dropped from Games Workshop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbgYaeerXhg
We'll have to wait until 2026 for the real thing, though.
Worthless! BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!
OK, seriously, is there an Astartes I? Thank you so much for bringing this to my attention!
Search for Astartes on YouTube. You'll find a good short film by Syama Pedersen about a squad of space marines boarding an enemy vessel and running into more trouble than they expected.
You may also be interested in *28 Years Later,* Danny Boyle’s sequel to *28
Days Later,* coming out in June. Cillian Murphy, who was in the first movie, is also in this one.
A second Trainspotting 2/Cobra Kai situation? OK, this should be amusing. I may actually have to watch this one.
Did you see 28 Weeks Later? I liked it better than 28 Days Later. It scared me horribly well.
I forgot about that one! Maybe I'll see them both!
Definitely seems like a much more ambitious project than last time - I see Tau, Tyranids, Chaos Marines, and a wide range of environments. So either some sort of anthology or a multi-episode story.
The original Astartes was excellent, so I'm excited to see what the animator can do with official backing.
Yeah, this is right, but I put it much more simply.
The rationalist community failed so miserably in cases like this because they were remarkably stupid and remarkably ignorant. No kind of neurodivergence is any excuse. Literature exists. History exists. If you have a curious brain, you should be curious enough and therefore knowledgeable enough about human nature and history not only to have recognized the craziness, but, even if you didn’t recognize the craziness, to have understood the possibility that your critics had enough of a point that you should really learn to understand your critics, rather than dismissing them for being right-coded etc.
I think the thing is they're so used to being rejected they sympathize with other rejects and can't tell or don't want to tell when they're actually rejected for valid reasons. There was a document about Geek Social Fallacies going around in the 2000s that said something similar. I'm actually not sure literature or history is all that useful here as this particular sort of problem is distant from the personality types of most literary authors and usually too small-impact to gain the attention of most historians.
There is a lot of both literature and history about crazy violent cults.
And there is a lot of both literature and history about the dangers of dismissing criticism because the critics were from outside the group.
This particular community achieved more prominence than “communities of geeks” usually do and this may have worsened the incentive structure for them to have any intellectual humility, but there’s still no excuse for not being familiar with concepts like hubris, or for not heeding warnings, given their explicit commitments to respecting rational arguments whatever their source.
I think rationalists tend to be mind-blind to their own irrationality, sure, but lots of big movements without that flaw spawn fringe groups, some of which turn paranoid and violent. I think it’s an example of how big-R rationalism can be considered a New Religious Movement.
It's a good point. I don't think the Zizians got that much traction, they just happened to do some damage locally. But overall, you're right.
> Yeah, this is right
I've read over the post again, and I can't tell what it is that you're saying is right.
What does stupid mean in this context? Foolish?
I was referring to a long comment about how Bay Area rationalists and adjacent groups failed not only to perceive the threat from the Zizians, but also got taken in by many other crazies and grifters because their social norms were too fucked up, and what was stupid about it is that it did not require a lot of intelligence to avoid failing in the way they did, it only required an acquaintance with history and literature combined with a bit of intellectual humility.
I have a hard time squaring your exhortation to "learn about hubris", when your advocacy use such demeaning language that views every mistake as caused by other people's stupidity etc
Look, either you think they made bad mistakes, or you don’t.
If you don’t think they made bad mistakes, fine, explain it and show I’m wrong.
If you do think they made bad mistakes, harshness of some kind is going to be necessary, the important thing is that it is directed at the right target. I’m blaming stupidity *of a particular type*, not because I always blame stupidity, but because the mistakes that were made could have been avoided had they taken their own stated principles more seriously and acted like rationalists really should. I’m far from the only person who has criticized this tendency, both before and after the SBF fiasco.
your comment has gotten separated from the one you’re replying to
I hate when that happens. Substack doesn’t work well when you use it through the Safari browser.
Ya substack sux
SPOILERS FOR NOSFERATU 2024:
I thought this was a great film, worth watching for Willem Dafoe alone, but what especially stood out to me was how it treated the sexes.
The film shows men as men and women as women and does a really good job at giving a coherent reading of both.
The friction between the wife and the male best friend for example: from his perspective, she's a flighty, fanciful, annoying woman who he puts up in lodgings not just for the sake of his friend but also because duty and decency demand it. He endures her company over weeks as she becomes harder and harder work, putting him to greater and greater inconvenience. At first he smiled off her talk of demons and dreams, but thing have gotten serious and she still speaks only in childish gibberish, refusing to address him using logic, like an adult. When he finally snaps at her tersely you can completely understand his frustration.
Meanwhile from her perspective, he's the controlling authoritarian who's dictating what she can and can't do, he's putting her through all this (entertainly oldschool) medical attention without thinking to ask her opinion on the matter, and most fundamentally he's patronising her, not taking her seriously, not meeting her halfway, not *listening* to what she's trying to communicate.
You might take one side or the other, depending on whether you have male or female sensibilities, but the *film* doesn't, it lets you see both.
Same goes for the main love triangle (which, rotting corpses aside, is basically the same one as Bridget Jones' Diary: love vs lust, there's the Nice Guy and the Bad Boy and she's caught between them.) Her husband is a good man, but sexually unsatisfying; Orlock is a horrible creature she can't stand the sight of - but he knows how to make her come.
Her husband's "sins" are - from a male perspective - ridiculous bullshit. He takes a job opportunity in order to better provide for their future. He grants a request that 99% of the time would be totally harmless and lets Orlock look at his wife's locket. And then he, after six weeks on the road and only desiring to get back home to his wife, hastily signs the document he came to sign, and doesn't stop and kick up a fuss about the fact that it's in an unexpected language.
The idea that this is enough to make a man unattractive has just got any sane logical bloke throwing his hands up in exasperation because clearly you just can't win with women. But from her perspective: the locket and the signing make him despicable because he was pressured into doing it by a stronger man.
Orlock meanwhile is a will that can't be denied - yes, he's threatening and menacing and murdering all her friends: but you can't deny he feels desire for her, just her. Orlock makes her feel pleasure from the very first contact. Later in dialogue they're both very clear that love is not on the cards, this is a purely physical thing that's going on.
Meanwhile hubby is shown sleeping in a separate bed, and later when she fantasises about him fucking her good and hard, we cut back to real life and see that he's just holding her helplessly. This is a good man, who loves you, who wants to do right by you - but he doesn't know what he's doing in the sack.
Hence the forbidden attraction of giving herself to Orlock. In a female-sympathetic reading, she makes a brave and courageous sacrifice at the end. But read another way: she gives herself to the sexually aggressive monster without hesitation or resistance, the moment Willem Dafoe gives her a justification that spins it as noble. Gentlemen, take note.
Well, Im happy that the film made sense to you. I didnt read it that way, and even in retrospect I dont, though Im aware of this general narrative. To me, it was just setting up a different ending - classicly heroic or christian redemption, maybe - and didnt subvert it well at all. Were doing fatalism now because... Mr Exorcist said so? I still didnt believe it was the only way when he said it.
Haven't seen the movie, have seen the Klaus Kinski "Nosferatu". So I'm going mostly from that and the reviews of this version I've read, which do seem to agree with your second point about the ending.
"But from her perspective: the locket and the signing make him despicable because he was pressured into doing it by a stronger man."
From the female perspective, not so much "Chad kicked sand in your face, ninety pound weakling", but the betrayal of intimacy. If the photo of your wife is on your desk, that's on public display. Other people taking notice of it, even the stronger guy, isn't that bad; if Chad makes mean comments ("wow I'd fuck that hot bitch") that's on him not on husband.
But a locket is something secret and intimate; it's like (in a modern context) her giving him the sexy nude photo or text that is only meant for him to see. If he shares that around with the other guys, even in a "wow look how hot my wife is" boasting manner, that's a betrayal of privacy and intimacy. It's not a compliment. Giving in to Orlok isn't so much about being pressured by the stronger guy, though that's part of it; it's giving in to share something he should not have shared, something that is meant to be within the bonds of their marriage.
There's *lots* of folk stories and myths about "guy falls in love with goddess/fairy woman who agrees to marry him on a set of conditions or else she'll immediately leave; he agrees he'll never break those; he ends up breaking them and she leaves him". One of the conditions often is "you'll never tell anyone about me" or something similar, such as "you'll never reveal I can do this thing". One version of this is the story explaining the curse on the men of Ulster as to why once a year they would be unable to fight due to being struck down with excruciating pains: a man married a goddess/fairy woman named Macha; he went to a royal feast and saw a horse race; he boasted his wife could run faster than the horses; the king forced him to bring her and make her run; she ran and won, but she was pregnant and gave birth, and she cursed the men of Ulster that in their time of need, they would be struck down with the pains of a woman in labour:
https://bardmythologies.com/the-curse-of-macha/
So - break the secret of what should be between the spouses, lose all.
"In a female-sympathetic reading, she makes a brave and courageous sacrifice at the end. But read another way: she gives herself to the sexually aggressive monster without hesitation or resistance, the moment Willem Dafoe gives her a justification that spins it as noble."
I've seen this referred to in reviews, that this version puts a different twist on the ending and undercuts the 'noble sacrifice' element. But again, I think your reasoning is a little too simple.
This is old-school Eros and Thanatos. I think even Freud discusses this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_the_Pleasure_Principle
It's being in love with Death, as in all the "Death and the Maiden" tropes, as in Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale":
"Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;"
Orlok *is* Death, and while he may indeed be terrible and grotesque and fearful, he is also strangely fascinating. He is the ultimate end to which we all go, no matter who loves us or tries to hold us back. And there is a strange, perverse allure there: the combination of the little death, to which orgasm has been compared, and the greater death in one as she gives herself over to Orlok. Sex *is* death, as all the slasher movies where horny teens making out attract the serial killer's slaughter remind us.
> There's *lots* of folk stories and myths about "guy falls in love with goddess/fairy woman who agrees to marry him on a set of conditions or else she'll immediately leave
There's actually a whole genre of these types of stories in Japan, except they're about an animal who gets saved by a man, and decides to return the favor by disguising as a human and then marrying him. Wife tells his husband to never enter the room while she's working, he ends up doing it anyways, and he finds out some horrible truth that makes either the wife or himself leave.
Tsuru no Ongaeshi is the most famous version of this kind of story ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsuru_no_Ongaeshi ), but the funniest version has to be the one that's literally just called "Clam Wife," where a man is greeted by a beautiful woman after returning a giant clam to the sea several days earlier:
> In The Clam Wife, a man finds a woman mysteriously appear at his doorway. They become married, and the wife cooks the husband a delicious bean soup each day. He peeks in on her cooking, and discovers that she is urinating clam juice into the soup, so he chases her away.
> Her husband's "sins" are - from a male perspective - ridiculous bullshit. He takes a job opportunity in order to better provide for their future.
I think his sins are more subtle. He seems like the nice guy who cares for her and takes care of her, but he fundamentally never listens to her and then acts like everything he does is for her. But we never hear her say that she's unhappy with their wealth. He's the one who seems more concerned about it and compares himself to his richer friend.
If he listens to her and does what she actually wants - instead of what he wants to do which he internally convinces himself is also what she wants - then the movie never happens.
If he listens to her and does what she wants, they end up poor and going nowhere and she is unhappy. Listening and understanding is important, but if he'd obeyed her every whim and let it direct their lives completely, she'd eventually find him far less appealing than she does in the film.
He is responsible for her future happiness and it's his role to overrule her when she's not thinking about it - which she categorically is not, she's got her head in the clouds and her main driver throughout the film is sublimated lust.
I do wonder how this new version stacks up against the Herzog movie; this scene, for example, which shows how the arrival of death (in the form of the plague) has overturned the conventional society in which the heroine lives; people have almost been - or really have been - driven mad by fear to the extent that now they *have* gone 'beyond the pleasure principle' and are now in love with death, celebrating it - as the plague party demonstrates:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdzHAKPV7dk
Sure, that's a perfectly valid position. But from her perspective she's being ignored, her husband isn't treating her like a partner, and he's cloaking doing what he wants in the pretense of love for her. He can't even take responsibility for his actions and turning it into her fault - he's doing it "for her".
Again, not to say he hasn't convinced himself that it's true, but from her end he's plainly ignoring her. And the direct result in the film is that he brings evil and death to her and the town's doorstep.
As you said above, it's also that he's weak. Once it becomes obvious that he's dealing with something terrible he doesn't stop: he still takes the money, he still sells the property. The contract complaint was ridiculous in one sense - I laughed in the theater about it - because he didn't know what he was signing; in another sense that's an even worse betrayal. He signed, from fear and greed, without even bothering to know what he was signing over. Except that he was at a minimum greasing the skids for a monster to become a neighbor.
The 1979 version directed by Herzog downplays the sexual aspects of the story and really highlights the husband character's failings. It's good.
ETA: The locket thing is also bad because of what he does afterwards, not the act of showing Orlok the locket. He has evidence that the fiendish hell-demon is fixated on his wife and he carries on with the transaction.
As I watched it I was thinking what I'd be doing in that situation (sign of a good film, that.)
I think I probably would also have just signed the document, on the grounds that I just want to get out of there and, since this is in the context of selling a house, if the worst comes to the worst and there's funny business, it's more my employer's problem than mine. (Though in real life I'm always willing to be awkward, that's in much less scary environments.)
I would also have been slow to accept supernatural explanations, for the same reason you would be if they started popping up in the office tomorrow: Victorian Germany is an enlightened scientific society and that sort of thing clearly belongs in stories.
I hope I'd have refused the locket, either non-confrontationally by showing it to the Count instead of handing it over, or more assertively by a polite "I need that locket back, milord," and not leaving til I got it. Probably wouldn't have fought on if he snapped, "No! Begone!" though, given the job thing and the fact that he's a social superior in a society far more hierarchical than anything around today.
And I would definitely have pursued the job in the first place, even over her protestations, for the reasons I said above.
The thing is, none of this is "bad" or "good". If she's happy and sexually fulfilled, it doesn't matter if I commit all or none of these "offenses". And she's not, even if I commit none of these wrongs, more sins will be identified out of thin air to crucify me with. That's the way this works.
"If she's happy and sexually fulfilled, it doesn't matter if I commit all or none of these "offenses". "
Well, even if husband is a mighty stud who pleasures her five times a night, Orlok's fixation on her after seeing the locket means he will follow hubby back to his home town to get her. So even with good intentions, bad consequences follow. If Orlok is unaware she even exists, he's not going to come in the night to eat her.
In this version, Orlok is already aware she exists. Shes kind of responsible for resurrecting him with her medium powers, and hes been spirit-visiting since shes a teenager.
> I would also have been slow to accept supernatural explanations, for the same reason you would be if they started popping up in the office tomorrow: Victorian Germany is an enlightened scientific society and that sort of thing clearly belongs in stories.
Oh most definitely. The film does a good job of showing the tension between a modern-ish society and the atavistic horror of an earlier age. They can look directly at it and not fully believe what they're seeing. There's enough ambiguity that I have no idea what I would think.
(Here again I have to plug the '79 version: the castle in that one is a complete ruin on top of a mountain where no one could possibly be living. It's more of a rundown cemetery.)
It's what is running all through Stoker's "Dracula": we're all moderns now and have Science, these kind of things all come out of the backwards superstitions of an age of darkness, there must be a rational and reasonable explanation.
And that's why the story works, because it's "oh no, the monsters in the dark *are* real and the rational explanation will get you killed". That is why the rather glib attitude of today that "dude, we've all seen the horror movies, we know about vampires, so we'd know that guy was a vampire if he tried it today" doesn't work, because imagine. Seriously imagine it for one moment. We'd be prone to dismiss it as "come on, vampires only exist in movies, they're not *real*" or "if that guy thinks he's a vampire, he's crazy and possibly a serial killer, but he's not a *real* vampire".
I'm going to have to see this bloody thing, aren't I?
I mean, manage your expectations. It's a slow, overwrought arty film and far more interested in gore than sexiness. None of the female leads are particularly pretty, imo, and the period style does nothing to help them.
My favourite thing about it was the Victorian* vibe of men with magnificent facial hair, listening gravely to expostulating professors, smoking indoors, and curing all ailments with ether and brandy.
What kind of films do you normally like?
*okay, Victoria's German equivalent, whoever he was.
I usually don't watch horror movies, I get scared. But Christina downthread convinced me in a prior thread it was actually unwoke. So I figured it was my duty to watch it and give Hollywood my money for making politically incorrect movies. I've been procrastinating ever since. :)
>So I figured it was my duty to watch it and give Hollywood my money for making politically incorrect movies.
Well... it's still a remake, though. Don't give them TOO much money.
Okay, but actually by choice, when you're not thinking about wokeness, what films do you genuinely enjoy?
I liked the latest Transformers CGI cartoon thingie. Napoleon was OK. Babygirl was awful--not sure if that reflects me or the movie quality. I'll probably just watch it for something to do.
I realize on the 1-10 problem severity scale, this is a 0.5.
I kicked off a discussion of Nosferatu 2024 in the comments here (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-362/comment/83633282).
I feel more than ever that the gender dynamics depicted in this movie are a goddamned *miracle* and an extremely promising sign. Eggers has absolutely no fucks to give about THE MESSAGE (as The Critical Drinker would put it). It's respectful and refreshing and I hope a sign of things to come.
I have read that and it made me incredibly curious about what you might mean with this:
> even more miraculous is its *utterly* unapologetic theme that a sacrifice imposed on a woman by her society and herself might not be all that different from her urge to self-destruct.
> And it apparently does not give the slightest of fucks about what wokescolds might have to say about the depiction of this female character or the implications of her choices.
But I also felt it might be too complex for me to understand without you writing an essay about it.
But I still wanna know.
You mean the movie depicts the female lead in a way that we are not supposed to think women to be?
Which way?
I remembered seeing a discussion recently but wasn't about to go back and find it, not when each page load gives Substack a fresh opportunity to paralyse my CPU.
But if anyone's dancing on the grave of The Message I'll always want in.
For what it's worth, Babygirl also gleefully dances on the grave of what THE MESSAGE wants to say about gender.
While the advertising campaign makes it look like a naughty romp ala 50 Shades of Grey, the actual movie is a very nuanced and sympathetic character study, with graphic sex scenes so deeply personal and specific to the particular characters that they don't leave any room at all for the audience self-insertion (pun semi-intended). It's one of the least-sexy movies I've ever seen, because it meets the classic definition of literary sex scenes needing to be about "sex and something else."
OK, I actually saw that one. What do you mean? Me and the person I saw it with both thought Kidman was believable but Banderas was miscast and the young guy wasn't very convincing in his...ah...'role', in either sense of the word.
I suspect Kidman was supposed to be a self-insertion fantasy for the people who write these reviews. You know, left-leaning lady with politically incorrect fantasies about hot younger man she feels politically guilty about, but then you add a layer of wokeness having her be a 'girlboss' archetype in a stereotypically-male field so you don't get shot down right away. (She struck me more as a consumer-products CEO than a tech CEO, but maybe Kidman just has too much charisma to do 'ascended nerd' well.)
Wow.
WOW!
This is one of electrifying Different Worlds moments Scott talks about (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/)!
Look, I'm a 45 year old straight woman who likes to bottom in kink. I used to consider myself a submissive, but I was submissive only insomuch as all students in all subjects are necessarily "submissive" to the experience of their teachers; once I had sufficient experience, I had to reluctantly concede the label. (This throat-clearing is relevant.)
This might be TMI for you but my first meaningful encounter with kink very superficially shared many of the beats as the scene in that shitty hotel room (including a laughing "What? No!"). You'd think that if that scene was going to sexually appeal to anyone, it would be me; I hugely enjoyed actually living some of it!
But no! Kidman's character isn't supposed to be a self-insertion fantasy! There's absolutely no room for *me* in that scene; Kidman's character and her pathology are *way* too present. Her anxiety and awkwardness and risk-taking are all *horrible* to witness; her life is absolutely not anything that a (normal, healthy) woman would fantasize about experiencing. I felt tremendous compassion and pity and protectiveness for her throughout the movie because her pathological interior life was obviously *awful.* When she first orgasms with the intern, I felt a gentle happiness for her, not any desire to *be* her.
I felt that because that's what the director intended me to feel.
Just consider how that very long, unbroken shot of her orgasming could not be less porn-y. We-the-camera are laying down with her on that (obviously smelly) gross shitty hotel room carpet, only top part of her face and later just her forehead in focus, seeing nothing of her body, seeing nothing of his. At one point she anxiously worries she's going to accidentally pee (SO SEXY! EVERY WOMAN'S FANTASY FOR HER FIRST PARTNERED ORGASM!), and then she deeply, unsexily chest-grunts her way through orgasm, completely in contrast with the breathy porn whimpering she faked with her husband.
The casting of the intern was telling, too. He isn't traditionally good-looking for a reason; the intention was for only his *energy* to be highly attractive to (mostly only) Kidman's character, not to a general audience. The movie was extremely careful to depict him as young, working-class guy whose read of situations is occasionally wrong (renting that shitty hotel room!) and who hasn't developed any patter or polish or strategy as a "dominant." That was clear whenever he was trying to bluff through his uncertainty about what to do rather than confidently going with his instincts, and *let* *me* *tell* *you*, few things are less sexy to the average healthy submissive woman than a dominant's awkwardness and uncertainty. You don't make a point of putting those moments in a movie if you want women to fantasize about those moments.
So...yeah...Different Worlds, indeed! For me, and for the fellow kinkster woman I saw the movie with, the writer-director, Halina Reijn was SCREAMING at the audience, "this isn't for you to fantasize about!"
I'm just amazed that's not what you took away from it.
Sure, that's why it's interesting to talk to different people. Why *would* we take the same thing away from it? I'm a 45ish mostly-straight guy who's mostly topped and keeps trying to go vanilla because it's obviously rational to quit in a culture going feminist and conservative at the same time.
Maybe 'self-insertion fantasy' was the wrong phrase, because I think you are correct about the staging and casting and so on: her misery and anxiety and embarassment is exactly the self-insertion point. It's not a sexy self-insertion, it's an I-can-relate-to-this-person self-insertion, like all the crap they used to put heroes through in quest stories back when they actually made them for boys. 'Literally me' as the guys like to say. I am starting to think, on discussion with you, it's a quest story.
The idea I had is that she's like all the woke secretly-subby liberal ladies who write movie reviews for art movies (you may not be the *exact* target audience), so she's recapitulating their journey or the journey they'd like to take, being overpressured in a hectic job, balancing family and work demands (but see, she's a girlboss, so she's an aspirational figure too!), feeling guilty about these 'regressive' fantasies, and getting in a relationship with a younger guy (thus proving their attractiveness) before finally getting their husbands (who look like Antonio Banderas) to do (to them) what they want. (But you're still able to Put The Patriarchy In Its Place, and dispose of the unwanted boyfriend after the fact in Tokyo.)
You may not fantasize about the course of the movie, but you fantasize about someone like you having awkward experiences and *then* getting what you want...preserving the marriage and getting your kink while you're at it. It's supposed to be the girlboss's initiation into the life she wants, the initiation isn't supposed to be easy. There's a call to adventure, the dude's kind of a threshold guardian, there are trials, you even have that 'underworld' sequence where they go into the club and it's kind of dreamlike, and after a final confrontation between the dude and her husband, she returns to society, i.e. her marriage with the prize (confidence in her kink and a willing partner who looks like Antonio Banderas). It's a quest story, they're not fun while you're there, anymore than Indiana Jones enjoys dodging boulders.
If it were a more politically-correct 50 Shades of Grey with consent and safewords respected they couldn't have gone for 'character study' and so on. Of course apparently they got totally snubbed (except for Kidman) and it didn't work anyway.
I might give it a try. But I've had my fill of non-sexy sex-and-something-else for the time being and I wouldn't mind being entertained by sexy sex-and-something-else instead. For which I recommend Wild Things.
I've of course seen it. Great caper switcharoo movie.
re the executive orders
I read a bunch of them, but not very closely and like you should probably want lawyers to read and understand what several of the orders references "I stop bidens order blah blah, <trumps rants about what that did>" youd have to go read bidens order to actaully understand whats being said and I didnt even attempt to.
Why does it seem like *no one* is informed about them; at all, has jornalism fallen so much that you can find some interns are told to read 1/3rd each write up some summaries?
I've seen plenty of informed experts commenting on the orders under their purview on X and BlueSky. Might be worth searching on those platforms for commentary. Often it's in the form of "I work in X industry and this is what the Order means for me" or "I am a lawyer in X area, here is what this means".
"has jornalism fallen so much"
Yes.
"has jornalism fallen so much that you can find some interns are told to read 1/3rd each write up some summaries?"
Unpaid interns cost too much, this is what we have AI for!
I think I would rather read an AI summary, than an unpaid intern's opinion.
https://www.akingump.com/en/insights/blogs/trump-executive-order-tracker
A couple of law firms are following it, this one appears to update the most frequently.
People here might be interested to know: I just tried giving DeepSeek the official political compass test. I got rate limited about halfway through, so I don't have actual results, but most of the answers it gave were consistent with a moderate "lib left" viewpoint (the green square). It seemed to have stronger opinions (in the left direction) on economic questions compared to others, with the only exception being tariffs (it was in favor of tariffs).
Of particular interest here, I suspect, is the answer it gave for the proposition "land shouldn’t be a commodity to be bought and sold", which included the sentence "Policies that limit land commodification, such as community land trusts or land value taxes, can promote more equitable and sustainable land use, ensuring it serves the common good rather than private interests."
So there you have it. DeepSeek is Georgist.
Disclaimer: I was only using the "chat" version on their website (free tier), and I did not use a separate context window for each question due to laziness. The exact rate limit message was "You are sending messages too frequently. Please wait a moment before sending again."
You can see political compass results for all major LLM's here: https://trackingai.org/political-test
DeepSeek is indeed in the lower left, along with all the other LLM's.
Thanks for doing that! Wonder how much this is for public consumption.
I wouldn't be surprised if they produced it at least in part to tank the American stock market. Would be quite sensible from the geopolitical competition point of view (but then why tip their hand?) Certainly it's a big comedown for the USA, which thought it was ahead in all that stuff. I'd like to think it'd be our Sputnik moment, but I think the country's too far gone.