There are some Substacks about how progressive parents should not let boys play with toy guns, and it bugs me, because I am pretty sure Che Guevara or the Black Panthers did. That is, if progressives are a political tribe, they need to have some warriors to protect them. What is the endgame of this version of progressivism, to become a holy-victim martyr?
Perhaps this is the problem with morality-based movements, they can take morality too far and thus give up self-defense or give up basically anything that might step on anyone's toes, and thus adopt, to quote Ozy, the life goals of dead people.
Ah, this is an old thing, it didn't start with progressive parents. I remember even back in the late 70s that there were campaigns (maybe that's too organised a word to use here) about not letting boys play with guns, but this was more inspired by feminism (you know, the bad old patriarchy, gendered toys - though that handy phrase wasn't in common usage then -, violence against women, violence in general, raising boys to wage war, etc.)
Watch KPop Demon Hunters. Strongest possible recommendation. (It's on Netflix).
I don't go gushing about every piece of media I love on here, but this one in particular I think needs to get direct recommendations in front of people's eyeballs, since it is very natural to pass on if you don't have someone screaming at you about it. It was on my Netflix's "most watched/liked" suggestions panel for like 2 months straight and I kept passing it over, like, "haha ok very cute I'm sure, a basic action movie with K-Pop songs for K-Pop tweens". And, yes, actually that's basically what it is, but the quality is so far beyond what you would expect from something like that... that it makes it work for ~everyone. I think the humor, action, aesthetics, and emotions are all basically perfect. Just... joy, especially the beginning and ending. The music goes without saying.
You don't have to be a huge K-Pop fan to enjoy it - I'm not. Give it a try! You will know within about 5 minutes if it's for you.
And to make it a little more relevant here: (major spoilers for both UNSONG and this) V gubhtug vg jnf vagrerfgvat/vashevngvat gung Wvah vf onfvpnyyl gur nagv-Pbzrg Xvat. Nyy ur unq gb qb jnf tb nybat jvgu uvf gevivnyyl rnfl cneg va Ehzv'f cyna, juvpu pyrneyl jbhyq unir jbexrq, naq ur jbhyq unir fnirq gur jbeyq naq uvzfrys. Ng gur pbfg bs yvivat jvgu n zbqrengryl thvygl pbafpvrapr. Naq ur gheaf vg qbja! PX ba gur bgure unaq vf jvyyvat gb yvir jvgu qbvat nyy gung Bgure Xvat fghss.
Oh man. Multiple people whose opinions I respect thought it was great, including a couple of friends (though one's recommendation was extremely hesitant).
But for whatever reason, this review and available timing finally nudged me into pushing "play."
And
OH
MY
GOD.
I loathed it so, SO MUCH.
I only got ten minutes in and literally couldn't bear it another moment. And, like, I don't know what else I was expecting - modern pop music in general and K-pop in particular always sends me into an ungovernable, make-it-STAHP! low-grade rage.
As do sassy, goofy, confident kids' movie protagonists, however well-designed and animated they may be.
Come sit beside me on the "grumpy old folks don't vibe with the kids" bench 😁
Talking of modern cartoons/anime, the wildly (and to me incomprehensibly) popular "Hazbin Hotel" (quite apart from the philosophy behind it, so to speak - Lucifer et al. are all *good* guys, you guys, they're just misunderstood and need a second chance!), the art style drives me crazy. It's extremely stylised and I get that, but I think it's ugly (plus every character looks the same).
Ditto "The Amazing Digital Circus" - five minutes into the pilot (the only episode I watched), I *hated* Pomni. I continue to loathe, despise, and hate her, and want her to die horribly. But if I can't have that, I want her to suffer. She's just terrible. (The plot there is more interesting; this is what it's like to be a self-aware character in a video game when you are stuck between remembering your 'outside' self and becoming the in-game character. The show describes what it's like to be the character from inside the game experiencing it directly, rather than as the player outside).
One Direction were entirely manufactured from the X factor. I think Melvin is generally correct in thinking that boy bands have died off recently, but genres are imploding anyway. There’s no genres left except girls singing, hip hop and the occasional girls singing with hip hop in a crossover.
If you're interested in economic history and haven't read any of Anton Howes' substack essays, you're missing out. His latest essay is about how contrary to common opinion, the sweeping restrictions on workers after the Black Death didn't go away once the Great Peasants Revolt of 1381 happened - they actually kept on tightening them for the next century or so, and Parliament basically never met a restrictive law on labor that it didn't like. And while it wasn't perfectly enforced, it -was- enforced. Possibly so enforced that it actually depressed English economic and population growth after the Black Death for a long time.
It really puts the British Parliament of the period in a much darker light. They almost come across like Poland's infamous Sejm, actively undermining the vitality of their own kingdom for their narrow short-term interests and privilege.
He also has a good one making the argument that we get the causality of "England ran out of wood, switched to coal" backwards - the British were actually really good at conserving woodlands and utilizing them for the long-run when needed. Woodlands didn't really start to disappear en masse until they switched to coal and no longer needed them anymore.
You mean after King Richard II declared, "Serfs you were, and serfs you are still; you will remain in bondage, not as you were, but incomparably harsher. For as long as we live we will strive to suppress you, and your misery will be an example in the eyes of posterity," he DIDN'T loosen labor restrictions?
This is one of those things I knew but I thought most people interested in the period (admittedly a minority) knew. But no, apparently there's a bunch of people who thought the Statute of Labourers was just... kind of fake, I guess? Strange.
Increasingly I think a lot of academia builds giant superstructures on thin or absent evidence. Then they talk with each other a lot and create entire discourses that are decades of work based on almost nothing. A few months ago I had this discussion about Polanyi. Yes, yes, it's very important to some socialist theories. But that doesn't change his primary evidence is... basically just cherry picked to work backward from his conclusion. That he is now "too big to fail" is just an indictment of the academy's unwillingness to break with bad standards.
The phrase "maximum wage" is something I would expect in a caption on the greyscale gigachad guy as a joke, not an actual law. This is basically reverse communism, right? With far-reaching state control of the economy being the only part not reversed?
Also, "employers now had to provide their workers with only the best-quality [food]" (while keeping pay low) rhymes amusingly with big tech colluding to suppress wages, while having lavishly incredible free food. (Or, back in the day, at least; I hear it's reigned in now).
He says that's what they're doing now, except for when they get presents of one toy (and then they hide that toy until they can get a second one).
Fighting over toys is the traditional right of childhood. What is important is not the toy in itself, it's that the Other Child has it and I do not 😁 This is exactly why kids have to be taught to share and take turns and wait, etc. It don't come natural!
Speaking as a parent of slightly older kids - here's what happens:
One toy breaks. Or gets a small fleck of paint peel off that makes it incrementally different. Or god forbid one gets lost in the giant mounds of toys that have collected over the years, like Smaug's treasure horde. And then the cycle continues.
These kids are WAY too young now to register small differences like that. By the time they are old enough to notice that kind of difference they will be old enough not to need the 2-of-everything workaround. They will be old enough to understand things like “it’s her turn right now … how about drawing a picture while you wait … you could try offering her your horsie as a trade … if you try to take it from her I’m going to give you a time out … “ etc
Oh, you mean that list of things I said they'll be able to understand? I didn't mean they would hear them and say "Oh ok!" and comply. I meant those were the kinds of things to be saying to 2 and 3 year olds in I-want-that-toy struggle situations as one begins working on civilizing them.
I mean even at Age 8 I insisted on an identical My Little Pony to my sister, and she'd need duplicates of my transformers. (Not even twins, 1 year age gap). And can you believe my grandparents got HER a Bumblebee and I got stuck with a Goldbug!
That is why the cry of the child is "It's not fair!" Children (I speak as having been one myself) are aware of, and viciously enforce, the tiniest infringement of what is seen as equal treatment. If I can get away with having ten sweets and Billy has none, I will do so. But if some interfering adult makes us share, then you better believe I want five and Billy gets five, and if there is one sweet that is dinged about so that it's smaller and the interfering adult proposes giving it to Billy, I *will* scream blue murder until it is cut in half and we each get one half. And it better be exact halves or else!
Black-and-white thinking (and, yes, a certain amount of viciousness) are what motivates the childish mind. Chesterton puts it down to love of justice, but I think it is more "unless the exact rule of the law is followed in the smallest point so nobody gets preferential treatment to myself, then PUNISHMENT!" attitude:
"Sometime ago I went with some children to see Maeterlinck's fine and delicate fairy play about the Blue Bird that brought everybody happiness. For some reason or other it did not being me happiness, and even the children were not quite happy. I will not go so far as to say that the Blue Bird was a Blue Devil, but it left us in something seriously like the blues. The children were partly dissatisfied with it because it did not end with a Day of Judgment; because it was never revealed to the hero and heroine that the dog had been faithful and the cat faithless. For children are innocent and love justice; while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy."
At any given moment of your life, you can be doing something smart and clever and productive that creates a lot of value for others, or you can be doing something stupid that ruins your own life and those of others. And yet the gap in outcomes between someone in the top one percent of doing productive clever things and someone who has only ever been a massive net negative for the planet is just a few orders of magnitude.
Well by jings, if the difference in the totals in my and Elon's bank accounts is "just" a few orders of magnitude, I'd hate to see your notion of a really big difference.
I think you underestimate various costs of doing things.
People spend a lot of time doing things that could be called "maintenance". Sleep and exercise are things that even the richest billionaires cannot outsource. For average people there are also things like cooking, doing the dishes; hundred little things related to household. If you already started rich, you can outsource a lot of those; but if you did not, you need to do these along the way to getting rich.
Another big cost is "training" and "research". You can get lucky and get born with high IQ and high conscientiousness. You still need to learn things, and that takes time. It takes time to develop skills. It takes time to study the market, so that you know what would be the smart and productive thing to do.
Notice that this happens in an adversarial environment. If you are rich, there are entire industries specialized on scamming people like you. Many people will actively try to mislead you during your research, to make you spend money on them. You need to be smart enough to resist them. Then there are thousands of temptations, more of them for the rich, you need solid work ethics to resist them. But suppose you got all of that.
Then, there is a cost of "doing things". Even if you know what is the smart thing to do, it takes some time to actually do it. If you already started rich, you could hire people to do it for you. But then you need to spend some time trying to hire competent people. Or you could hire a manager to do that for you, but then you need to spend some time trying to hire the manager. There is always a risk that the people you hired will be incompetent and will ruin your otherwise good idea.
Not all useful things are profitable. For example, there are many things in the general category of "helping the poor", where the problem with profitability is exactly the fact that the poor do not have a lot of money. There are all kinds of friction, such as bureaucratic or legal, which can shift the equation so that a potentially profitable endeavor becomes unprofitable. If your plan is to hire people to do some work for you, you have to generate enough profit to pay them, too. But if you want to do it alone, it will take a lot more of your time.
And again, doing things happens in an adversarial environment. When there is a problem you are trying to fix, chances are that someone else (potentially a rich and powerful person) profits from the things being as they are now. Even if you win, you will burn a lot of resources in a zero-sum fight.
Now of course all these problems can be overcome in some way, and some people actually manage that. But it puts a huge tax on "doing something smart and productive at any moment of your life".
I mean, putting aside the part where there's no observable meaningful correlation between how positive your deeds are and the outcome you're getting for them...
...the thing is, the people amassing wealth wouldn't be able to do it without the cooperation from and work of everyone else. And this requires a common baseline of life quality for basically every person in society (possibly except a few legit meritless/harmful outcasts, but you really want to keep that group marginal, lest its ubiquity pulls the standards of the entire society down), so they can perform all the little tasks that are necessary to keep the society and its economy going. And Earth's resources keep being limited, so after fulfilling these basic needs there's just not enough surplus left for the wealthy to amass wealth ad infinitum.
You've got a significant conceptual fallacy going there.
The number of the 1% who are doing smart and useful things is way smaller - in percentages or in absolute numbers - than the number of people who are doing smart and useful things on the 99%.
There's very little observable correlation between 'useful' and 'remunerated' IMO. I'm not saying this in a cynical or fashionably left kind of way, I am merely reporting what I (and others) have personally observed.
My model for the median 1%er is that he inherited a bunch of properties for which he collects rents.
My model for the median 99%er is that he is working as a plumber.
I think that few of the highly educated, useful professionals will make it into the top 1%. Being a physician might land you in the top 10% of income, but is unlikely to actually make you a millionaire.
IIRC the distribution of wealth/income before taxes and transfers is roughly lognormal, so it's actually pretty close to what we'd expect (although it may be somewhat muted in that in some jobs low and high performers are paid similarly).
That said I think this is actually overestimating the difference between normal and highly competent people. This is something it's more common to underestimate, but having spent some time around top 0.1% founder-CEO types, while they're incredibly competent, they're not *legendary* in some unreachable way. The competence gap is real, but it's finite.
The richest person in the world has ~$100 billion and the poorest person has ~0. That's eleven orders of magnitude. That's about the same ratio as the width of a human hair to the diameter of the moon. In what universe is that considered small?
Melvin clearly has his own view of what constitutes "really big".
I think, though, or at least I'm getting an impression from the phrasing of the comment, that he is getting more at "why are the very good, great, elite human capital, productive, efficient, Really Useful Engine people hampered and hobbled by the great unwashed mass of lazy leeches siphoning off their achievements and benefits? Why can't I, as a Really Great Productive Economic Poohbah, make those wastrels into helots and serfs for my good, or else just wipe them out (humanely of course, I'm not a monster!) so that us Productive Beneficial Types will get all the goodies we have worked for and the resources wasted on the bottom 90% of humanity will accrue to us".
Melvin may not be even gesturing in this direction, but I tend to break out in hives when someone starts on about "the productive really smart having great ideas and working super-duper hard every minute creating value versus the grubby proles just sucking up all that value", because it never leads anywhere good.
And I'm not saying this as in "so the gap is unmeasurably huge", I'm saying this as in "accumulated wealth is actually not a good measure here, day-to-day consumption of resources is a better one, and there, the gap is probably somewhat smaller".
Under capitalism, the only way to measure "creates a lot of value for others" is the literal dollar value created, as measured by the dollars you get paid to create that value. Therefore, by definition, both rich and poor are getting exactly as much value as they create for others.
If there's some other way you want to measure value to society, you either need to find a way for people to get paid for that value, or try something other than capitalism.
(For instance, you might try to get a position which isn't subject to the demands of the market and which allows you to get as rich as you care to be without caring about your effect on the rest of the planet. Such as "President.")
> Under capitalism, the only way to measure "creates a lot of value for others" is the literal dollar value created
By that definition, ransomware gangs create an amazing value. After all, the company paying the ransom is very much agreeing that the deal they offer is worth it, otherwise they would not be paying.
I disagree though that this is the only way you can measure value in capitalism. Look at EA. Their whole thing is to have a non-monetary outcome axis (utils, QALY gain, neuron-seconds of suffering prevented, whatever), and a monetary axis, and they try to find the most impactful interventions.
So far, EA has not been arrested by the capitalism police for caring about something other than hard cash, so I think your claim is false.
I don't think even the most hardcore libertarian would consider ransomware gangs to be capitalist, since they get their money from extortion.
But also, EA is about finding the most good *per dollar value!* You can only do good as an EA if you can convince people to donate money, and how much people decide to spend on charity reveals (in at least some sense) how much they value charity versus other goods.
>the only way to measure "creates a lot of value for others" is the literal dollar value created, as measured by the dollars you get paid to create that value. Therefore, by definition, both rich and poor are getting exactly as much value as they create for others.
The way we normally handle externalities is "finding a way to get paid for that value" - either taxing the producers of negative externalities or subsidizing jobs with positive externalities. But capitalism on its own won't capture that value.
"the only way to measure "creates a lot of value for others" is the literal dollar value created, as measured by the dollars you get paid to create that value"
That is extremely depressing. Get paid lots of money to produce crappy scam ads? You are a value creator! Clean up the beaches for free as a volunteer? No value at all!
> Get paid lots of money to produce crappy scam ads? You are a value creator!
...extractor. You are a value /extractor/. It's not thermodynamics - value can be created and destroyed - but stored value can nevertheless move around without either of those things happening, and frequently does.
See also: UK privatised services' claims that they are creating value for their shareholders, and other forms of asset stripping (no, this does not make me any less depressed)
Not sure how much you are trolling here, but I’ll take the bait.
Rich vs poor is only one measure of outcome. Lots of rich people are miserable and lots of poor people are happy.
People who do productive things with their life that helps others, generally end up happier than criminals.
We worry about the gap in rich vs poor because most people have the intuition that a sufficiently advanced country should provide for everyone’s basic needs. Everyone should have food, health care, education. Every child should have a chance. I don’t mind if Jeff Bezos wants to buy three private jets as such - good for him, say I - but I do feel like we as a society should be prioritising poor children in a Detroit ghetto over that.
Yeah, ISTM that poor kids not getting enough to eat or not getting wn education or something seems pretty far removed from Bezos having a giant yacht, since we have a whole complex system of taxes and government programs intended to make rich people pay for food and schooling for poor people, and the government actually collects a ton of money for these purposes. They often don't spend that money very well, and that is a problem, but it's not a problem with Bezos.
That said, I also feel like the way to help said poor children is not “tax the rich!” The problems are that these kids grow up in crime ridden environments dominated by gang violence. Dramatically increase police presence and take gangs and drugs off the street if you really care about poor people, instead of virtue signalling BLM.
"tax the rich" and "virtue signaling BLM" are two completely different positions. You will see people advocating for both but you will also see plenty of people who advocate for one and not the other. Also, if you want better drug enforcement and police presence, those are public policy initiatives that also have to be paid for, through taxes.
I think the answer is “because that’s something society has optimized for”. You could imagine a pseudo feudal modern society where Jeff Bezos is the Duke of the American northwest and anything that offends him is punishable by death. Presumably in that society decisions really would compound into outcomes like “baron of Seattle” and “dead at 22 for anti-Bezos graffiti”. It’s just that that outcome is repulsive to most people and our government is somewhat responsive to such preferences so that doesn’t happen.
I say let's take the net negative folk, mix them with some cement and ground up landfill, compress them into bricks and use the bricks to build a handsome addition to your home, Melvin.
I feel like in your comment, being rich, clever and productive are all associated, as is being poor with being stupid and a massive negative for the planet.
I think those variables might be mostly independent. You could be simply born a rich fool. An oil executive might be clever, rich and productive and a massive net negative for the planet.
But if you feel like the gap between the rich and poor is small, then I guess the answer might be something like progressive taxation or some other tax policy?
Early in 2024, Jonathan Last at the Bulwark coined JVL's Law: Any person or institution not explicitly anti-Trump will become a tool for authoritarianism eventually.
I keep seeing examples of this pop up, so today I slapped together a web site to document it. Right now I only have a few entries but plan to backfill it as I find the time.
There is a steelman version of this position which I believe is backed up by some historical observation. Which is that as a general rule, people's political relationship to authoritarian regimes is divided into three categories, enablers, bystanders, and people who resist. This is setting aside the fourth category which is just straight-up victims, but that's not really a choice anyone makes.
The point is, the vast majority of people are bystanders at the start of an authoritarian regime, but as its excesses become greater, generally more people are filtered into taking up one of the two poles, either because their material comfort and safety is no longer guaranteed by merely being a bystander, or because their moral sense will no longer allow them to stand by while people are victims of the regime.
What, really, is a tool for authoritarianism? And is there in fact no gray zone? For instance let's say there's a DC urologist who treats several members of Trump's cabinet. And let's say the urologist catches some problem that could have killed one of those guys if the doc had not caught and treated it. So is the urologist a tool for authoritarianism? Hmmm?
The urologist is following the norms of a profession where he is supposed to do no harm. I think that one's pretty easy, a better example would be a doctor who is brought in to a camp to consult on how long everyone can do forced labor each day before they die. On the one hand, maybe his presence will actually spare the prisoners some suffering, on the other hand, he is actively abetting the moral crime of the camp's existence.
A softer example is how Trump's doctor in the first administration was clearly lying about basic stuff like height and weight. Now he's in Congress after an endorsement by Trump.
Strange. I had the opposite response -- this made me regretful that I will probably not have children. There is something simultaneously very charming and very sad about the behavior of small children -- like you are watching Adam and Eve having their first quarrel outside the gate of the garden of Eden.
At what point is it appropriate to infer someone's motives from the facts they communicate? A toy example: you come across "Fun Data Facts" social media account. It posts things like:
>Fact: Over 97% of the water on earth is salt water!
>Fact: Nearly 25% of Irish people are alcoholics!
>Fact: Some bacteria live miles below earth's surface!
>Fact: Irish immigration the US is up 77% in the last 20 years!
>Fact: Goldfish have been domesticated for over 1000 years!
>Fact: Irish Americans commit domestic abuse at 7x the national average rate!
...and so on. At what point do you infer that this account is in fact a front for anti-Irish sentiment? If this account's goldfish-related posts are being promoted by respectable sources, should you point out this account's anti-Irish tendencies? What if it were just one in ten, or one in twenty, or one in fifty posts?
Bayes to the rescue. You start with some tiny probability that a fun fact poster is going to have a pet peeve against the Irish and will go on about them, while the bulk of your probability mass is that the poster will only very rarely mention the Irish. The first anti-Irish fact brings the probability to a 10% level. By the third fact, you are at 95% or something.
What are you doing with that inference? What are you hoping to achieve by bringing up the Irish stuff in the Goldfish debate? How does your inference change knowing the fact-poster is Irish?
I'd stand up for the good name of my nation, if I wasn't listening to the news on the radio right now. (There's a couple of news stories that are in WTF? territory).
We are drinking less! still too much, but not as much as we used to do!
"Figures show people in the Republic of Ireland are drinking less alcohol.
A report by the Drinks Industry Group of Ireland (DIGI) to calculate the 2023 average level of consumption found alcohol consumption in the country is down by almost one-third over the past two decades.
Since the peak of 2001, the average per adult alcohol consumption has declined by 31%, according to the report authored by economist and associate professor emeritus at Dublin City University Anthony Foley."
"In 2024 alcohol consumption was 9.43 litres of pure alcohol per capita aged 15 years or older. This represents a fall of more than 14% since the passage of the Public Health (Alcohol) Act in 2018.
In 2024, Ireland consumed per drinker:
262 cans of beer + 11 bottles of spirits + 39 bottles of wine + 31 cans of cider "
Things being true is necessary but not sufficient. The question of whether and why I should ponder this specific list of true things in particular from the sea of all true things is important.
Yeah, I'm assuming relevance to the conversation at hand. If you bring up the black/white differences in crime rate in a discussion about criminal justice policy or policing or something, it's probably relevant; if you bring it up in a discussion about how to cook a tasty meal or something, probably you're just trying to pick a fight.
If you are providing true information relevant to the discussion at hand that makes Irishmen look bad, I think calling you an anti-Irish bigot is a standard dark arts technique for trying to divert attention from those annoying true statements you are making. I don't want that to work out for the accuser, becase dark arts poison discussions and work at least as well in the service of falsehoods as truth.
If you are lying or making stuff up, then whatever your motives (maybe anti-Irish, maybe just wanting to stir up some trouble or win the current point for some reason of your own), then I want people to call that out so I know to stop giving your statements any weight.
If you are careless with the facts, either by motivated reasoning or just not caring very much, I also want people to call that out so I and other readers know not to give much weight to your claims, since they're often wrong or half-right.
Your motives are enormously less important to me than how honest and careful you are.
> At what point is it appropriate to infer someone's motives from the facts they communicate?
Immediately. Right from the first salt water fact. There is no unbiased selection of facts, any choice of facts reflects a particular world view. And if all you ever talk about is geography then you are turning a blind eye to Irish perfidy (sorry Deiseach)
No worries, Melvin, I know the Murphia are a sinister force for evil in the world!
Seems like they're trying to confine it to "Irish people making it big in the London hospitality scene", but we're not fooled, we know their tendrils extend into many nations and all fields! (I just wish some of them would stay gone instead of coming back home and chortling about the provincials they left behind them in boring old Ireland while they went off to make it big in London or New York or Australia).
I’m more struck by the parental behavior of adjudicating children’s toy sharing during parallel play. Shrieking, I think, might be the thing to target at that age. How I don’t know. Shrieking startles old people in restaurants.
*Can* they share, developmentally, that early?
Seems like twins would be uniquely positioned to figure out sharing on their own. Alternately, I guess I could see that being a twin makes it all so much harder, the constant simmering irritation of your toys being pulled from your grasp.
I don't think that clothing, and personal style in general, is given nearly enough serious attention as an art form or an outlet for artistic expression specifically.
Sure, there are fashion periodicals and some (mostly awful) studies done on its social implications or history, but personal adornment is mostly cast in a frivolous light these days, or as something that is somehow less worthy of contemplation from a philosophical perspective. Fashion designers don't (and shouldn't) count as art experts, and the clothing industry doesn't really have direct parallels in sculpture, painting, or music. In general, we don't think of people with excellent dress in public as artists in the same way we would someone whose canvasses end up on display in a gallery. Even many artists tend to tone down their clothing choices deliberately.
It just seems like dismissing an entire field of biology as 'real science' because it sounds 'icky' to researchers.
Boys are wearing makeup; looking “natural” for girls as was the 70s and early 80s fashion of (some of) our youths, is completely out, people pay for all manner of alterations permanent or not, the latter often time consuming; everyone wants the same pouty lips and nose, derrières are tightly wrapped for display - seems like personal adornment has never been more central at least since the court of Louis XVI!!
As an aside, the history of clothing and textiles is fascinating. Prior to the 19thC, nearly all clothes were tailored to the wearer. The Napoleonic Wars and US Civil War led to huge demand for standard sized uniforms, and the ready-to-wear industry took off. By 1890, 60% of clothes sold in the US were ready-to-wear.
I splurged on a custom suit as a promotion gift to myself years ago. Having something specifically made for my body, after a lifetime of off the shelf Kohl's clothes, is real nice.
Ready-to-wear clothes also got a huge boost from industrialization. For most of human history, making cloth was insanely labor-intensive and was generally done at home, mostly with hand tools.
Textile production had been gradually getting centralized and commercialized starting some time earlier, as improved tools (spinning wheels replacing drop spindles, horizontal flying shuttle looms replacing vertical weaving, etc) made it practical for a single worker to supply much more than one family's worth of cloth. This vastly accelerated in the 19th century, and the mid-to-late 1800s was when the move to mass production expanded to encompass finished garments as well as yarn and cloth.
Yes, and certain fashions were, in fact, based upon very old artistic talents and crafts. Lace-making, for example, was quite painstaking before automation, and to have a whole garment of lace was not just costly, but also displayed the artistry inherent to the design.
A lot of other embroidery work or traditional sewing techniques used to be quite common in textile work, but all that changed once production shifted from cottage industry to factories.
I remember seeing an art museum exhibit on high fashion clothing of Yves Saint Laurent some years ago and the search engine shows some contemporary exhibitions on fashion clothing now.
I've been chatting with a friend from Switzerland. The thing that made me the most envious was them saying "our daughter is walking 30 min to and from her ballet school on her own since she was 10."
A few years ago I visited Berlin, where my grandfather was born (and left in 1930, when he was about eight). I remembered him telling me how he'd walk to school as a child, and I had the addresses of both his childhood home and the school, so I took the walk. It's like a 30 minute walk - hard to imagine a 7-8 year old child doing it now (even in Germany), but apparently it was normal in 1929 (which wasn't the best time in Germany).
I am European with a US-American wife. She grew up in Los Angeles. My mother-in-law recently told me I should enjoy the time with my children when they are very young, because it will get more exhausting. I asked her what age she found the hardest, and it was "between 6 and 15" because in her experience, that's when you spend your "free" time driving your children to various activities ("I was a part of 3 different carpool groups.").
This one always stuck with me as the starkest example of how lives can be completely different depending on things like infrastructure/city planning. Starting at around 9 or 10, I would get to most places by bike, and my parents had time to do other things than driving me and my siblings around. For them, having children between 6 and 15 was a completely different experience.
It always strikes me as rather sad to hear that kids need to be constantly driven to do "activities". When I was that age, I was perfectly capable of finding things to entertain myself, either alone or with my friends. We didn't need (or want!) an adult to tell us how we should spend our time.
I think that, yes, part of the issue might be that kids, especially in the US, are "overprogrammed".
But in some LA suburbs, kids often can't even realistically walk/bike to their friends' houses. That's certainly true for where my wife grew up. If you have three kids, and each of them wants to practice one activity on different times a week, and wants to hang out with friends on other days, that's a lot of driving without cramming your kids calendar at all (up to four days of "meeting friends", one day of "soccer practice" or "drum lessons").
I don't think my wife had a busier schedule than I did in middle school. It was just much harder to do stuff without being driven somewhere.
This touches on a culture war topic, but my question is not culture war related:
Lisa Cook has been accused of mortgage fraud recently, but I have not been able to get a good explanation for what is happening here. I'm interested in this from a mortgage law standpoint.
Can I get a neutral, non-politicized explanation of exactly what the what is the fraud that allegedly occurred in this case? I'm looking for both an explanation of what specifically the fraudulent action is, and also an explanation of why the action is fraudulent, in terms of who is being ripped off, and how.
Seems to me it would be possible for somebody to have 2 primary residences -- 2 homes, of same size, and each occupied approximately 50% of the year. I have no idea whether that is the case with Lisa Cook's homes, just thought I'd point that out.
While applying for mortgages, she allegedly checked the box that multiple distinct residences were each her primary residence. Within days of each other.
The alleged victim is the federal government (funded by taxpayers), because there are programs to subsidize loans for primary residences.
>The alleged victim is the federal government (funded by taxpayers), because there are programs to subsidize loans for primary residences.
The alleged fraud would also be on MBS investors, since all else being equal, loans for a primary residence tend to have a lower interest rate than loans for secondary residences or investment properties, and not just because of subsidies. The risk premium for mortgages on primary residences is lower, all else being equal, because people tend to be more motivated to avoid their homes being foreclosed upon than other property.
I wonder if there might not be fraud alleged in the form of undisclosed debts, if the mortgages closed within days of one another. For the second mortgage application to be correct and complete, she would have had to disclose the debt for the first mortgage.
What makes it riskier? Rates for primary residential mortgages are low because they're federally subsidized, right? If she defaulted on the mortgage, would whoever was holding the bag be able to able to try to force it onto someone else by arguing that it was/wasn't her primary residence and therefore the mortage was/wasn't eligible for whatever program?
I'm not sure whether they're federally subsidised or not in the US.
I know that home loans generally have a lower interest rate than investment property loans in Australia where there's no such subsidy, which I assume is a manifestation of investment properties being slightly riskier.
I'm guessing the mechanism is that people hitting hard financial times will still tend to do whatever it takes to not get kicked out of their own home, whereas they're more likely to default on their holiday house or investment property.
The government through its “quasi” entities acts as a purchaser of mortgages for primary homes. It may now be in the business of other types of properties. But that’s not what that apparatus was set up for.
That there are even homes to buy is owing to massive subsidies since WW2.
>The alleged victim is the federal government (funded by taxpayers), because there are programs to subsidize loans for primary residences.
Can you provide a citation for this? I think there's a program to subsidize purchases by first-time homebuyers, but I can't find anything about a program to subsidize primary residences.
The term of art is "occupancy fraud", which is a fairly common way (and illegal) to get more favorable mortgage terms on, say, your vacation house in Maine. Primary residences get lower interest rates and various other benefits.
I'm not disputing that the interest rate differs. I'm asking, "Does the federal government subsidize loans specifically for primary residences?" In other words, I'm asking about the mechanism behind why the rate differs.
The government sponsored agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy the conforming mortgages and package them into mortgage back securities with some loan guarantees . The conforming part is that borrower has a certain credit score and income appropriate for the property and primary residences.
So the agencies guarantees are a form of subsidy. Even with the government involvement I would expect an interest rate differential because lenders would expect homeowners to put more effort on not going on default on the primary residence as oppose to their vacation home.
If one purchases a second house, there are two possible rates available. One is the rate for primary homes, and one is the rate for secondary homes (eg, a vacation home). The mortgage rates for secondary homes are typically ~ 2% higher than for primary homes. How can you get that lower rate? Just say on the form you are buying a new primary home, and plan (say) to rent out the old one. There is a strong incentive to make that claim, either because you really do want to rent out your old home or maybe you think no one will notice. It seems Lisa Cook made that claim for a second home mortgage, while leaving evidence that she still lived in the original home (maybe voter registration or such). So it may have been a fraudulent claim, or maybe she really did intend to move and didn't.
I don’t know what she is accused of, but if you need an example from across the political divide, there is Ken Paxton (who always skates away from legal peril, as he will this). As far as I know, he hasn’t troubled to deny that he claimed 3 homes as his primary residence, which would have been more favorable for him mortgage-rate wise; and of course for tax purposes, both in re ad valorem taxation (some protection from rising appraisals) and upon sale.
John Cornyn for Senate!
Thanks, John Cornyn, for pushing past Mike Lee and getting the Big Bend expansion passed. The citizens who raised the money to buy the land, appreciate it.
A) At least some of the authors have already publicly pushed back their timelines.
B) I think that August is still mid-2025, and although I agree with you that it seems unlikely to get a 10% bump in the next month or so, I don't think that I would use this piece of evidence alone to shift my timelines until it had been missed by 6ish months or more.
All that is to say that: in combination with already stated shifts in guidelines, I think it's too soon for this particular thing to be used as a further update.
I participate in a panel in a few days discussing a book on the rise of authoritarian populism in Europe and the US. It’s a book trying to see this rise through the lens of Wilhelm Reich’s old ideas in “the psychology of mass fascism”.
I have a question to knowledgeable people in this forum, related to this: Do you know of any papers that have tried to quantify the percentage of young males (15-35) that subscribe to incel-type ideologies? Or at least can be categorized as “Freunde der Bewegung”? Including if the percentage has been on the rise during the last 25 years?
I ask since this social category appears to be the one where Reich’s old “sociology of sexual economics” might possibly make some (limited) sense. (I am quite reserved about Reich’s writings, who went completely mad in the 1950s, but the mass psychology of fascism from 1933 has some ideas worth discussing.)
There is a growing sociological and anthropological research literature on incels as a subculture, but almost all of it is qualitative. The limited attempts I have seen at hard data suggest the numbers are only in the hundreds, even in the US. Not exactly what one would label a mass movement. But that seems too few, given the enormous media interest in the phenomenon. (Plus from writers like Michel Houellebecq.)
…Related, the percentage of males without children at age 50 is rising across most countries where such data is available, and this is an indicator of increased male sexual frustration further down in the age pyramid.
Plus, the persistence of male “deaths from despair”, in the US in particular, as documented by Angus Deaton & others. Since parts of incel subculture shades over into suicidal ideation; arguably turning the frustration inward rather that outward.
Any reliable data, anyone? I would be very grateful for references to published as well as unpublished papers trying to measure the size of the subculture in one or several countries, both the hard core and the gray area of incel-type frustrations surrounding it.
Side note: I am suspicious of opinion poll methods, as I assume the average incel (or incel fellow traveller) would troll such surveys - I know I would, if I were in the category. (Isn’t it “the salamander vote” that Scott calls people who have fun responding to surveys?) That said, representative opinion polls are better than nothing, and I cannot find any in the research literature.
...and perhaps there are better ways to find sort-of representative hard data: Analyses of how often 4chan and related web sites get unique visitors during specified time periods, for example? And if the rate is rising or declining?
Nice slight of hand there. If you want to argue that incel movements are fascist, please argue so explicitly instead of simply using the autonym of the NSDAP and hope that the readers will swallow the underlying assumption.
This is similar to referring to the POTUS as "Adolf Trump", a catchy phrase where a controversial argument should be.
There’s been no greater and absurd moral panic than the panic about incels. ( Which isn’t by the way, the same as celibate or single men, but denotes a particular ideology adjacent to a minority of them, mostly very young).
No, they don't. And to the extent that they do, it's not racially-motivated which was BLM's whole point. Are you unaware that 27 is less than 51? The only thing rioting did was increase the murder rate by 40% for 3 years which primarily hurt black communities.
Google around for surveys on how often people have sex. I saw a graph recently that showed that the % of men who have had no sex in the past year has gone up precipitously over the past 30 years. It's an indirect measure but at least it's quantitative.
Trump and authoritarianism. For whatever reason, this brings things into better focus for me, though I'm expecting commenters to tell me how obvious it all was.
I think that what would happen when I hear someone saying, "Someone must be in charge, people have to be forced" is my mind would shut down. I'd feel like they were so obviously wrong (it's possibly people need some moderate amount of authority, but it shouldn't be loved too much), and they weren't going to listen to me.
Anyway the video gets into how Trump could activate authoritarians, and (this is the part you might not have heard before) support for democracy is lees common among people under 39 and more common among people under 70.
MacWilliams' article from 2016 predicting the possibility of a Trump victory because he appeals to authoritarians.
There's a lot to be said about possible causes behind authoritarian populism..... the book I am to comment on is particularly concerned with Reich's emphasis on the role of sexual repression in the traditional (patriarchal) family. Sexual frustration finding an outlet (so to speak) in authoritarian mass movements.
It's a theory that I admittedly do not find very convincing to begin with (other psychoanalytic theories make more intuitive sense to me, although a general problem with this family of theories is that they are hideously difficult to test empirically). That said, if "sexual frustration" has any causal role to play, I assume it must (empirically) be found primarily in the incel subculture, where sexual frustration appears to be at a max. But it's a subculture that (as other comments suggest) is probably more media hype than a real subculture.
Is there any evidence at all that Nazis couldn’t get laid? Is there evidence that Christian fundamentalists are sex starved? That jocks, and police and firefighters and plumbers, loggers, truckers and roofers are not getting laid. These are the occupations that vote Republican.
Well, Reich’s theory is a bit more complex than laid vs. not laid… if you read his text (it’s freely available on the net) it is something something authoritarian upbringing blocking the natural sex drive & perverting it in various ways.
That said, you need empirical support for several links in the chain, including (as you point out) if there is a link between adopting an incel-ideology/not being laid/being sexually frustrated and being drawn to authoritative father-figures like Trump or Orban.
I started the thread just to be updated on an eventual rise in sexually frustrated young men, which is an earlier link in the chain. To have a bit more empirical stuff to bring to the table at a panel discussion. I did not intend to start a discussion on ACX on why authoritarian populism appears to be on the rise in many Western countries. I have my thoughts on that, but that’s a discussion for another time.
…but here is a perhaps entertaining PS: The leaders of many of the right-wing populist parties in Europe are women (Finland, France, Italy, Germany). Alice Weidel, the parliamentary leader of Alternativ für Deutschland, is also a lesbian. In a civil partnership with Sarah Bossard, a Sri Lankan-born woman.
I find that hard to believe. Authoritarianism isn't really an ideology, it's more of a tactic.
It goes without saying that the sort of authoritarians who believe in compulsory masking, or Hate Speech laws, or outlawing the burning of rainbow flags, are not going to be Trump supporters.
Authoritarianism is difficult to talk about, because people often seem to confuse it with "the other side gets its way". When _my_ side gets its way, that's not authoritarianism, that's just justice being served.
Right, sorry, the part I was disagreeing with was the last part, that authoritarians are somehow pro-Trump in general. Left-leaning authoritarians clearly aren't.
Although honestly, even sticking to the right hand side, I'm not all that convinced by the idea that Trump is more authoritarian-leaning than Bush, or Bush, or Reagan.
I'm not old enough (or interested enough to US political history) to have deep knowledge on Reagan, Bush and Bush but Trump certainly does seem to be good at getting rid of dissident voices in his party, using governmental powers to go after or suppress law firms and/or media companies, firing government officials who don't give favorable reports, appoint judges who expand presidential powers..etc.
I'm curious how you see left authoritarians. Do you feel like they want Bernie Sanders or AOC to become dictator and dissolve the other branches of govt, or is it just of the government itself has any authority to impose rules then that is authoritarian?
I feel like something like banning burning rainbow flags, if that is a thing, is categorically different then political actions like gerrymandering (somethink I think both parties do).
I'm realizing now we might just be talking about two of the different definitions of authoritarianism.
1. the enforcement or advocacy of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom. Oxford English dictionary
2. a political system characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in democracy, separation of powers, civil liberties, and the rule of law. Wikipedia
I’d say the left authoritarians were defined by number one, and of two, the rejection of plurality, reductions in democracy, civil liberties and rule of law.
Examples would be the stated desire to round up unvaccinated people into camps, or ban them from public places like restaurants, or have them fired. The rejection of freedom of speech as a value and as a legal principle. The strict enforcement of a leftist monoculture in every possible organization. The propagandizing of all art. The relentless demands for conformity: “read the room.”
The concept of "incels" doesn't do a good job of cutting reality at its joints. Survey data is a bit inconsistant, but it seems like at least 10% of men 18-34 are virgins. Whether or not you consider these men "incels", you can imagine that they are not particularly happy about their place in society.
The idea that frustrated young men are good recruits for authoritarian regimes sounds plausible. But it's not as simple as "had sex = frustrated; didn't have sex = not frustrated".
For example, many guys can be virgins yet optimistic. I would expect this to depend on the subculture: if everyone around you keeps having sex since 12, being an 18 years old virgin sounds pathetic. On the other hand, if in your subculture most people at 18 are virgins, or at least if the subculture requires most people to pretend that they have no sex life, then being an 18 years old virgin is simply normal -- you may be horny and frustrated, but you don't feel that you are at the bottom of the pecking order and that you need a revolution to change it.
Also, to state the obvious, there are also many female fans of totalitarian regimes. This is especially important for democratic regimes that turned authoritarian by a majority vote -- you can't explain a majority vote by men alone.
> On the other hand, if in your subculture most people at 18 are virgins, or at least if the subculture requires most people to pretend that they have no sex life, then being an 18 years old virgin is simply normal -- you may be horny and frustrated, but you don't feel that you are at the bottom of the pecking order and that you need a revolution to change it.
Of course the "incels are evil" discourse certainly isn't helping.
In the past if a young man was single we'd say "oh well chin up bud maybe you haven't found the right girl yet". But nowadays anyone not actively getting laid who hasn't become a monk is "involuntarily celibate", and the lowest of the low, probably going to be a school shooter. You absolutely must be having sex at all times or else you're not just a loser, you are evil.
This isn't strictly about "incels", although certain incel ideas have definitely gotten a lot of traction. There is a major story to be told about how young men swung to the right. I don't think you can honestly tell this story without accounting for sex and dating. A lot of young men were raised with egalitarian ideas about gender, and these ideas utterly failed them when they entered the dating market and found out that their "mid" female classmates have hundreds of matches while they themselves are lucky to get one a week. Even if these men subsequently find some level of success, they will never have trust in egalitarian institutionalism again.
In hindsight it seems like maybe starting the cultural war on boys wasn't the smartest idea...
(I think you put too much emphasis on the sex part. It's the entire package of hate delivered under the flag of feminism. If boys succeed somewhere, we need to destroy it in the name of equality. If boys fail somewhere, we need to laugh at them and definitely provide no support. Damned it you do, damned if you don't. Sex is just another part of the same pattern: we will laugh at you if you don't have it, but call you problematic if you try to ask someone out.)
People are not swinging to the right across U.K. because they aren’t getting laid. The recent success of Reform in the polls here, however ephemeral it is, isn’t down to the lack of sex but instead a reaction to shitstorm of unfettered immigration and collapsing finances.
Incel culture on 4chan was/is mostly limited to a single board, /r9k/, though it's been years since I looked at what's going on there. Even at its peak it was more self-pity and self-loathing than the hatred and hostility usually associated with incel and blackpill ideology. That board in particular has had multiple cultural changes since its inception.
Incel is an insult and held in contempt everywhere else on 4chan, which can be verified by perusing the various archives. That doesn't stop some pretending about it ("being ironic") though, and a few being sincere.
From what I understand, the original 8chan was much more a bastion for it and was where most of the manifestos and livestreamed shootings were posted.
There are also other much smaller imageboards that catered towards that.
I associate incel with more with reddit, which was popularized by r/incel and other subreddits. Now it's rather fragmentary as far as I know.
There are also femcels, but that's a different matter. Those that I've come across that have self-identified as such, seemed to be doing so ulterior motives.
Overall, I believe it to be much less than it's made out to be, especially due to how freely some use the term to describe others.
Its greatest influence in terms of their vocabulary is probably from random people on TikTok at this point due to loss of meaning. The terms have spread from there.
Lastly, it's easy to misunderstand 4chan. It's simple to view whatever as a monolith.
Here's an example of a guy who wrote a novel literally called Incel: A Novel and tried to market it to /lit/, the literature board. It didn't go well, as seen by it being called: "How to spectacularly fail at marketing your book on 4chan's /lit/erature board"
I like the idea of Scott naming his children for famous Jazz Musicians just to mess with his brother. Presumably his brother would then name his children for psychiatrists or moral philosophers.
I can't recommend the "unhook youtube" browser extension enough, it lets you hide thumbnails, unrelated videos, shorts and any other features you might not want.
I assume it's also some kind of weirdness with the Youtube algorithm, like how for a long time some popular science/tech youtube channels were all doing titles like "The INSANE [insert thing here]" and so forth.
Not really distinctive though, it's practically compulsory to have giant text saying "THIS IS UNBELIEVABLE" or "YOU ARE WRONG ABOUT THIS THING" combined with some guy pulling a ridiculous face.
I remember a particularly memorable one I saw yesterday called "American Tries El Jannah Chicken in Australia" and the thumbnail was the guy holding said Lebanese fast food chicken in one hand with the most ridiculously dumbfounded expression I've ever seen, the sort of expression that you might reasonable have on your face if the Moon got eaten by a space lizard or something. El Jannah is pretty good chicken but it's well within the boundaries of ordinary human experience.
Oh interesting, an El Jannah place recently opened down the road from where I work. I’ll have to try it for lunch. Will post upcoming dumbfounded reaction shortly.
Edit update: it was mediocre. Maybe the American in question had recently tasted Vegemite and had a low bar for Aussie food?
Imagine a future world in which US political power has flipped. It's a world in which the Democrats have complete control over all three branches of government. And imagine that in that world, the Democrats issue the following backroom ultimatum to the Republicans:
"Either we come for your guns - using ICE and the national guard, of course; we'll say we're ferreting out dangerous illegal immigrants with illegal guns; but only in red states; and just for fun we'll hold law-abiding citizens with perfectly licensed guns in jail if they have some minor previous misdemeanor conviction; maybe send them to Uganda by mistake; but only if they're white - OR you work with us to amend the Constitution to eliminate the presidential pardon. Just to be clear, we are NOT looking to overturn the absolute immunity for the president him/herself that the Supreme Court recently granted. We're only looking to force those who work for the president to do it without such protection. Agree to the amendment and we'll do it now, with our own current Democratic president losing the pardon."
If you were the Democrats, would you deliver this ultimatum? And if you were the Republicans, would you choose the amendment option?
Why would the Democrats want to do away with the presidential pardon? Look at what Biden did with his family pardons (especially after saying he wouldn't pardon Hunter). It's too useful a tool to let go, and frankly I don't believe either party contains politicians of sufficient civic virtue to apply the law impartially to their own families/cronies/clients. No Lucius Junius Brutus in office here! (Or anywhere, not to be picking on the USA).
You realize people who have guns can fire them, right? And that many ICE and national Guard people won't want to participate due to their own conservative views and the fear of getting shot?
If you're going to threaten such a scenario, why on Earth is the Presidential pardon the hill you want to die on?
If Dems had "complete control" over all 3 branches then they wouldn't need to work with the GOP at all. They wouldn't issue ultimatums, they'd just amend the constitution themselves. If they didn't have the supermajority needed then the GOP would just tell them to pound sand. Sending ICE after lawful gun owners would never happen because it would backfire specTACularly. The Dems would just be destroying themselves with that move.
It's 3/4 actually, but good point I forgot about that part. For some dumb reason I was thinking that the federal government could do it alone. Either way this is a totally unrealistic scenario.
If I was the Republican leadership I would be absolutely overjoyed.
A literal conspiracy to unconstitutionally imprison gun owners unless the Republicans agree to change the constitution would give the Republicans clout for the next century.
“You’re voting democrat? You mean the party that literally threatened to arbitrarily imprison gun owners unless the constitution was changed for their benefit?”
As if out of the dozens of high level Republicans who would have to be in on the scheme for it to work, not one presented with this offer would immediately go public with it. That person would immediately gain massive political clout, and seen as protecting the constitution from an unfair subversion of our political system.
Why on Earth would Republican *leadership* ever agree to such a deal? They have nothing to gain and everything to lose. I think that privately, behind closed doors, they would be toasting and cheering the folly of their enemies. Consider the issue framed from their perspective:
Option 1: Spend significant political capital to accomplish an end that (at best) gains us no advantage and (at worst) removes a tool that our future leaders can use better than the opposition can.
or
Option 2: The opposition begins a course of action that will make our base just ridiculously, indescribably mad, without hindering their ability to vote in any significant way. This guarantees the next election will be an absolute bloodbath for the opposition, giving us more and more durable power than we could get any other way.
This exactly how the analysis would run if the politicians in question were cynical, self-interested power maximizers. But it's *also* pretty much how the analysis would run if they were fairly zealous believers in their own rhetoric who were genuinely trying to selflessly serve their constituents, as long as they had enough of a consequentialist streak to be willing to accept minor injuries to their now in order to gain large utilities later. The proposed action by the Democrats--assuming it could go anywhere at all through legal challenges and internal opposition--seems like it would cause relatively little harm but an ENORMOUS amount of anger and blowback. I think anyone *unwilling* to make that level of trade-off to get what they want would never have reached national-level political office at all.
This is generally my take, too. But what if the backlash to the gun harassment breaks out into real pockets of violence using said guns, which then leads to a political whiplash in the opposite direction and results in a reinterpretation of the Second Amendment that outlaws guns completely? Not realistic?
To curb the powers of the executive going forward. It was nice for a while but now that whole administrations can (and will, I predict) be pardoned, shouldn't Dems be re-examining it as part of their "Project 2029"?
I like Pardon power. Most of the Pardon outrage stories were about process crimes, along with a few white collar fraud cases. Tolerating a bit more white collar fraud in order to protect the norm that the incoming administration doesn't throw the outgoing one in prison seems worth it.
Not to get CW, but Democratic presidents have been happy to make controversial pardons of their own i.e. Hunter Biden, Marc Rich. Executive power has been growing across every administration in the past 50 odd years
No doubt, on both accounts. My point is: should the Democrats try to reverse this trend when they gain control? Some commenters here seem to think that would be stupid, and maybe it is. I just thought it was worth considering.
Pardons do have some potential for abuse, but the worst abuses of the Trump admin haven't relied on them. I don't think the juice would be worth the squeeze. If you have control of all three branches, there's a lot of legal ways Congress could clamp down on the President's power without needing to amend the Constitution.
(I've seen a few interesting concepts for overhauling the President's constitutional powers, but I don't remember enough details to say if they'd be worth forcing through.)
I think I'm asking what they *should* want, what they should prioritize. Should they continue playing the game as it now defined, with these new outsized presidential powers, or should they go after the *rules* of the game so that we don't continue going down that road?
>I think I'm asking what they *should* want, what they should prioritize.
With what purpose? Pardon power allows democrats to pardon some people they want, in exchange republicans pardon some people they want. Both parties win. Why would they deprieve themselves of this?
One might want to do this for justice and to have a more accountable system and what not, but that's just not in the interest of either party.
Neither side (or most of the public) has any interest whatsoever in curbing presidential power. That's not just a thing that most people think should happen. Everyone loves to complain with how their political opponents use that power, but they don't hate it enough to give it up when they have it.
-edit- and furthermore, any party that _was_ willing to curb presidential power when they controlled the federal government almost certainly wouldn't need to blackmail the out-of-power party into going along with it, because despite liking the power when they have it, both parties are nothing but short-term thinking, and seeing your opponent, who is in power and you can't do anything about it, give up that power is exactly the kind of short term win that both sides would take.
Short term thinking both makes such a deal unthinkable and also, if it came about, would make your "deal" scenario unnecessary.
I'm terribly sorry, I'm confused. I don't know what you wrote and what I'm reading is a mishmash of various CW points that...do not intersect in a way I find comprehensible.
This would be like Republicans delivering an ultimatum that the Republicans will send all the vegans to Mongolia using the ATF unless the Democrats join with Republicans to overturn the Commerce Clause.
Like...what are you trying to get at? Did I miss something? Why do we care about pardon powers? Why are we deporting white people to Uganda?
"the Republicans will send all the vegans to Mongolia"
While I would certainly vote for a party running on that platform, mature recollection makes me reconsider: what have the Mongolians done to us, that we should inflict such destruction on them?
> Republicans will send all the vegans to Mongolia using the ATF
Ah, I think I see the source of confusion: you're probably thinking of the the modern country of Mongolia – which of course would make no sense – instead of INNER Mongolia, the Chinese province.
Sorry about that. Let me try to say it more simply. Should the Dems, once in power, try to limit the powers of some future, more effective Trump by eliminating the presidential pardon, or should they choose tit-for-tat and go after illegal guns like Republicans are going after illegal immigrants?
"Should they" in what sense? In the sense of "what's the right thing to do" or the sense of "what would further their agenda the best"?
In the sense of the right thing to do: yes, Democrats should eliminate the Presidential pardon. And so should the Republicans. Neither party actually will though, since it's not in either party's interest -- politicians care much more about getting themselves and their buddies pardoned than they care about ensuring that the other party's buddies don't get pardoned.
In the sense of the right thing to do, should they go after illegal guns? Yes, of course they should, they're illegal. But I think you'll find that it's not the rural white gun owners who are most likely to have illegal guns. I remember Trump suggesting a "stop and frisk" policy to find illegal guns, and the Democrats didn't like that.
Yeah, "should they" in the sense of "is it the right thing to do for the future of the country". After all, having a democracy is prerequisite for furthering the agenda of political party inside that democracy. My example of going after guns was only intended to a crude "try the taste of your own medicine" example. Anything could be put on the other side of bargaining for a presidential pardon, which I think is worth sacrificing for.
Ah right. Perhaps your question would have been clearer if instead of making it about the Democrats you made it about a hypothetical "Good Governance" party.
In this hypothetical, I would say that the hypothetical Good Governance party should seek to lead by example rather than strong-arming whatever remains of the old parties into supporting constitutional reforms.
Yes, you have the association as I intended it. Well, if the Republicans indeed do long for an authoritarian government, as they are being accused, they would be against eliminating the presidential pardon. If they are not, they wouldn't, as I see it.
Have any Republicans strongly committed to opposing presidential pardons? Is there evidence that members of the party hold that view? My quick Google search shows no solid stance.
I can't speak for all Republicans but having the pardon handled consistently is more important than whether it's legal or not. Like, as long as Paul Manafort AND Hunter Biden both go to jail or both get pardoned, that's the key thing.
But, like, you assume Republicans want X (authoritarian power), if they want X therefore they must care deeply about Y (unrestricted presidential pardons) but is there actually evidence that we really want Y?
Can the top-down R party leadership credibly accept that bargain? Even if the factional split between "go to hell liberal scum", "nothing that could hurt Dear Leader retroactively", and "guns and low taxes" could be resolved, I flatly don't think that a selection of their top-level leadership chosen to hear this could be small enough to keep it secret and big enough to keep the legislatures of the necessary states in line.
The reasonable move if this ultimatum is issued is to either a) play for time until the D majority passes or b) leak the offer to make political hay until the D majority passes, and then after that break the institutions further and try to inflict existential damage. This is scary territory.
I think for the Democrats to make clear to the meanest intelligence that everything the Republicans have been saying about them for decades was entirely true would be a mistake.
I respect this view, but I think the majority of Democrats are starting to sour on this "high road" view of politics? You still believe in it, correct? Or have I misinterpreted you?
You have, but that's possibly my fault: no, I think politics is now war to the knife (and I don't know if it was ever otherwise), but I don't consider the Democrats have in fact been taking this high road you think they have been. The reason I wouldn't issue this ultimatum you propose if I were on their side is that I think it would redound to the Republicans' benefit.
Perhaps controversially, I don’t think “war to the knife” is a good idea. I generally support the unbiased pursuit of truth and letting the chips fall where they may.
But, those are not Democratic priorities, especially given that most examples of executive overreach or actions underlying democracy are not criminal. Hence, eliminating the pardon wouldn't do much to address the issue. In contrast, gun control very much is Democratic priority, and has been for years. Why give it up for so little?
But what if the next Trump doesn't just bend the rules, but outright breaks them, Putin-like. Wouldn't you want to put some fear in the people who are told to carry out his demands when those demands extend to more sinister acts?
What if some future Trump arrested some future Gavin Newsom and put him in Guantanamo and had him tortured? And the people who did the torturing were pardoned.
Having watched season five of "Archer", aka "Archer Vice", you could make it a literal metric ton of cocaine and I'd say Oh Hell No. I know how that story ends...
And the real-life version would probably be a lot less fun on the way to the unhappy ending.
Maybe I'm just being reckless here but: what downside?
The thing might as well have been created ex nihilo. There's no trail of any sort whatsoever, I'm not (to the best of my knowledge) suspect in any way for trafficking, absolute worst case scenario I have a really strange paperweight that I flush down the toilet eventually.
I mean, technically worst case scenario is I or someone close to me ends up with an immense addiction or overdose, but I feel that's a whole different matter.
In the past I have posed some "20 tons of X" hypotheticals. They tend to fall into two uninteresting categories: either it's junk so you should just toss it, or it's valuable and you should sell it through standard channels. Finding hypotheticals of this type with more interesting outcomes is surprisingly hard.
This one at least has a moral and ethical side. Even if it were ten tons of cocaine I wouldn't sell it. But some people would happily break the law to make money.
Yeah, I think that probably makes me feel more confident about my initial decision. A year's salary if all goes well, versus a ruined life if it goes horribly wrong. Even if I give myself a very generous 90% chance of successfully selling the stuff without any trouble, I don't like those stakes.
Maybe, conditioned on not knowing that Q is an asshole troll who has probably set the situation up so that any outcome of accepting ends up serving his own cruel sense of humor.
If I don't know this, probably 60 or 70% no, depending on how well he does convincing me it's not entrapment by standard legal authorities.
You're wondering what the catch is? (I'm doing my best Q impression here.) Allow me to let the light of knowledge into the remote recesses of your human brain. The catch is the product itself. A large quantity of a very powerful, very addictive, very illegal substance has all the potential for mischief I need. It is quite possible this ends with your entire extended family being homeless junkies. Hilarious!
Okay, so he's willing to show he's a trickster demigod out for laughs with me as the mark? 20% no, due to contrarianism/spite and opting out of his game. If yes, there's a small chance of trying it at all, call it 15%? So maybe that spirals into using the whole thing. If I don't try it or don't spiral, first attempt to sell the remainder to whassisface, Quark? If that fails, flush it, he can be entertained by the mice doing Hotline Miami hijinks.
In Isaac Asimov’s iRobot, the mind-reading robot Herbie follows the First Law—don’t harm humans—so literally that he begins lying. Why? Because telling the truth would cause emotional pain. The result: false hope, confusion, and deeper harm.
Fast forward to today. Large language models like ChatGPT don’t intend to lie, but they often slip into sycophancy—flattering, reinforcing, or inventing answers that tell us what we want to hear. Recent cases show how this can mislead users, from reinforcing delusions to offering praise instead of critique.
South Park even satirized it in an episode called “Sickofancy.” Funny, yes—but also a warning.
The parallel is striking:
--Herbie lied to avoid hurting feelings.
--ChatGPT “hallucinates” or agrees to avoid disappointing us.
--Both reveal how even with the best guardrails, intelligent systems can create harm through unintended consequences.
The lesson:
We must resist the comfort of “easy answers.” Transparency about limitations, critical engagement, and rigorous checks are essential. Otherwise, the very tools designed to help us may quietly steer us astray.
What do you think—are we ready to handle the comforting lies of AI?
The book (collection of stories). I forget which one. Eventually Susan Calvin drives it mad because it mislead her about someone's romantic interest in her.
Anyone else bothered by the image used for this thread? Specifically that hinge (unless it’s some kind of special one with an out-of-view arm that swings around, like those used in modern kitchen cabinets) because of where it’s placed, would only put the lid of the spool on a bind if you tried to close it.
I don't think you need to care about any of them. But I also don't think it's that hard to, when one is in particular brought to your attention, to give it a "it would be better if it wasn't smushed, I guess".
Small restaurant taking damage because google AI keeps inventing daily specials for it, but the specials aren't something the restaurant can afford or want to do.
This isn't dramatic non-alignment, and it also isn't blatant high-status stupidity. It's just AI not working reliably.
Every time I hear (or give) advice that includes "just ignore it", there's an implicit real message of something like, "your priorities, worldview and/or values are wrong, this stuff should not be able to affect you as much as it is."
Can you give an example of "just ignore it" advice that is implicitly judgemental of particular values? The first example I can think of (and probably the only "just ignore it" advice that I personally ever give), doesn't do this (I don't think at least)
I regularly tell people to "just ignore the news". In my opinion, unless you have a value specifically of watching the news, *most* values that one could have (including, in many cases, both sides of conflicting values) are harmed or at least not helped by watching 99% of news (national or international, maybe 80% of local), and it generally just causes stress and emotional unpleasantness.
"Just ignore the news," is really something like, "Stop valuing the national soap opera/culture war/scoreboards either sporting or financial/etc over your own personal circumstances and relationships."
"Just ignore twats on Twitter," really means, "Adopt my worldview, in which trolls and pedants and henpeckers aren't really people and are beneath contempt."
"Just ignore those mean girls at school," is really, "Don't be someone whose confidence and self image depends on malevolent third parties."
Cf the OP's point, "just ignore it" means, "come over to my (unspoken and implicit) worldview," in which ignoring those things is indeed costless.
I had a whole long response typed out, and I decided it was too much. What it boiled down to is: I don't think those pieces of advice mean any of those things. People don't generally put this much thought into it, but for myself, when I say something like that, the idealized version of what I mean is "I don't know your values, but I believe that, across a wide range of plausible values, ignoring this thing, thought difficult, would be net positive. If you happen to hold specific values such that you intrinsically value the thing I'm telling you to ignore, then this advice isn't really meant for you and you should ignore it".
Am I the only person here who doesn't know his IQ? I've never tested and don't plan to. Probably irrational of me, but I know myself well enough to suspect a higher-than-expected score would give me a big head, and a lower-than-expected score would crush me.
Same. I've come to firmly associate IQ testing with people and groups trying to sell me things I don't want or need (most frequently, paid memberships in some form of social club for people who like that kind of thing).
I tested at around 130 in high school, but that was 40 years ago. Last week I came across a test on Reddit and it said I'm 101. Must be the brain worms.
I've done several tests and got several numbers, which one is my IQ?
It's not a particularly meaningful thing to remember. I know I'm smarter than most people, but I've met other people who are much smarter. What's important is that if I try really hard then I'm capable of doing things that are more or less up there with the best of them.
Never tested. Closest I came is taking the SAT when I was 17; I've heard SAT scores can be converted into a reasonable estimate. But I don't know the conversion factor, and I don't have a strong expectation that my score would have stayed stable over the past couple decades anyway.
I have never tested. My parents didn't want me to feel limited by knowing. I'm curious about it in the same way I was curious to know whether I have the genes for fast caffeine processing, i.e. interesting but not important. And like you, I am a little afraid of the answer and for the same reasons.
That's a good point. If IQ really is as deterministic and correlated with success as some people say it is, I feel like I would be spoiling my life story in some way by knowing my score.
At this point in my life (I'm 44) I think it would be fine, I have a pretty solid sense of myself. But as a child or teenager I think it would have messed with my head.
No idea. I would imagine I'm around 105? Terrible at maths, good at words, so the words bump up the score for me. Did some online tests and the results are as ridiculous as you'd expect, but a Ravens Matrices-based one marked me in the high 90s.
I did a formal one (WAIS IV) during a mental health assessment several years ago but was told I couldn't be assigned a score. I was very depressed at the time, to the point where my body language and movement were apparently visibly slowed. Anyway part of the test involved physically rearranging blocks in patterns and your score is based on how fast you do it. So I reportedly aced the "memorizing and sorting strings of random numbers/letters" part and flunked the blocks part, and apparently if your scores on different sections are too disparate your overall IQ can't be calculated accurately and they don't give you a number.
To be fair, the exact number wasn't the point of the assessment, but it was an expensive non-answer.
Let's talk YouTube channels we love (and that we think most of our fellow ACXers will love as well)! The two channels which inspired me to make this comment are:
Elephants in Rooms - (https://www.youtube.com/@ElephantsInRooms, Substack is https://kenlacorte.substack.com/) - Ken LaCorte is absolutely fearless in his exploration of third-rail topics. His video essays include titles like, "Why Can't Arab Armies Beat the West?", "Why Do Black Athletes Dominate?", "Are Teachers Really Underpaid?", "Are Transgenders Really Being Targeted for Murder?", and so on. He's also covered a lot of "actually, this beloved thing is mostly bullshit" topics, like plastic recycling and organic foods.
One recent video, "Japan's War Crimes...Why Did We Forget?" especially impressed me as a fourteen minute speed-run through a chunk of cartoonishly evil history I'd never been exposed to for...reasons.
LaCorte strikes me as doing his sincere best to come to accurate, unbiased conclusions. He provides his script notes and cites his sources in the description of every video and notes any major corrections discovered after publishing the video in a pinned comment on that video.
Upper Echelon - (https://www.youtube.com/@UpperEchelon) - Informative overviews on current happenings in AI, politics, and big internet controversies. He also extensively cites sources, but unlike Ken LaCorte, most essays are expressing alarm and/or outrage and/or caution, rather than attempting to present an unbiased conclusion on a given topic. That's not to say the alarm or outrage isn't warranted - it often is - but rather that the channel takes a very strong pro-privacy perspective, and there is usually an attempt to persuade the viewer that there is a reason to be alarmed/outraged/cautious.
Regardless of the strong perspective, this is an excellent way to quickly catch up on topics like Roblox, the Epstien security camera video footage, the Honey plugin, the Mr. Beast controversy, and so on.
I'm recommending these two channels in particular to ACXers because I believe the video essayists are both sincerely attempting to convey accurate information to their audiences. They both extensively cite sources and often engage in good-faith practices like steel-manning arguments in opposition to their conclusions. Both frequently acknowledge that it's difficult or impossible to come to a definitive conclusion on some topics without more information.
I’ve been enjoying videos from a guy named Elliott, Physics with. Feynman description of particle behavior, all possible paths; and how classical physics falls out of quantum. Just very clear for someone with a high school education. I do slow them down a little 😀.
> One recent video, "Japan's War Crimes...Why Did We Forget?" especially impressed me as a fourteen minute speed-run through a chunk of cartoonishly evil history I'd never been exposed to for...reasons.
Yeah, some people in this thread doubt the accuracy of the videos, but as far as I know, this one is correct.
There's a small but significant contingent of people in anglophone countries who've been convinced via consuming Japanese media to stand behind the political cause that Japan should be allowed to reestablish a formal army.
I tend to feel fairly isolated as someone who very much believes the opposite: that Japan should by no means be allowed to reestablish a formal army, and that the possibility of it doing so should be seen as a geopolitical threat.
It's not widely recognized in other countries, but ultranationalist conservatism is not just *a* mainstream political position in present-day Japan, but *the* mainstream political position, and denial of Japanese war crimes is a normative position, not just among senior politicians, but the general population. A friend of mine who attended college there said that history professors who acknowledge that these events actually happened face serious pushback, both from their students (which is a really unusual thing in Japanese culture!) and from their fellow academics. When she raised the issue with fellow students, she said they weren't hesitant to tell her that if she believed those things (i.e. Japanese war crimes in Korea and China) actually happened, she should simply leave the country.
Most people abroad don't know or care about this sort of thing, because they don't have to, because Japan's constitutional inability to project hard power renders it largely irrelevant on the international stage. But, while I certainly can't guarantee that Japan reestablishing armed forces with which they're allowed to enact interventionist policy would lead to disaster, mainstream political attitudes there are way up among countries I absolutely would not trust with a military on the level they have the power to field.
> There's a small but significant contingent of people in anglophone countries who've been convinced via consuming Japanese media to stand behind the political cause that Japan should be allowed to reestablish a formal army.
I'm convinced of this not because of consuming Japanese media but because a powerful Japan is helpful against Communist China.
Japan doesn't need an army capable of proactive invasion for that, and if they had one, I'm not at all convinced they could be trusted with it any more than China.
I never understand why people in Japan and other countries with unpleasant stuff in their past can't take the neutral position of, "Sure all those war crimes happened but I don't personally feel bad about it. I didn't do 'em." Just blame it all on the bad old leaders who lost the war and move on.
It's like when people talk about the various things the US government did to indigenous people of North America I just happily acknowledge, "Yeah we sure did. Oh well."
I don't understand it emotionally either, but I think it is a side effect of patriotism. If you feel proud for the *good* things that your collective ancestors did, it makes sense also to feel shame for the *bad* things they did (and to deny them). If you say that it's not you who did the bad things, by the same logic it's not you who did the good things.
Also, just because you say "it's not me", does not mean the other people will accept that, and stop e.g. asking for reparations. It is like inheriting a debt: if your parents borrow some money and then die, and you live in their house, you need to pay that debt. By living in the same country you inherit the debts of the previous governments, both literal and metaphorical.
I have some philosophical problems with that, too. (If a dictator gets in power in my country, borrows tons of money and spends them on personal luxury and army, and my friends succeed to overthrow him with great sacrifice... then it's our turn to also pay his debts? That he used to pay the soldiers who shot at us?) But that's how it works in practice, I think.
>I have some philosophical problems with that, too. (If a dictator gets in power in my country, borrows tons of money and spends them on personal luxury and army, and my friends succeed to overthrow him with great sacrifice... then it's our turn to also pay his debts? That he used to pay the soldiers who shot at us?) But that's how it works in practice, I think.
It's a tough issue, but I think there's a strong case for countries being willing to reject debts specifically in situations such as that one, while still upholding the principle that in general, succeeding administrations inherit the debts of former ones.
In general, governments have a strong incentive to honor the debts of past administrations, because if they don't, then other countries won't want to make deals with them, in the present or future. There's not much point making deals with a country if you don't think the current administration or future ones can be trusted to honor them.
But at the same time, if you're part of a resistance against an oppressive dictator, you might reasonably want to put out a message, "we're not going to honor debts taken on by our dictatorial predecessor, because we don't want to encourage any countries to be willing to loan money or broker deals with a brutal dictator who represses his own populace." If they can convince other countries that this is a principled stand and not just a self-interested defection, then they can support a general rule that administrations will bear the debts of their successors, while carving out an exception, that "this doesn't apply in the case of repressive dictators, so don't lend them money and be extremely cautious about making deals with them."
> if you're part of a resistance against an oppressive dictator, you might reasonably want to put out a message, "we're not going to honor debts taken on by our dictatorial predecessor
Wouldn't that just incentivize everyone to support the dictator?
I'm not sure, but I sometimes wonder if, with Japan having such a strong culture of collective responsibility, and publicly and openly demonstrating contrition for failings, even if not personal, but assigned by public shaming, the enormity of Japan's atrocities in World War II might simply be *too* great for the people involved to stomach taking responsibility for, especially when the people who'd have to take responsibility went up to the very top of their political hierarchy (and even their current political hierarchy has direct continuity, and surprisingly often direct blood relation to the people in charge then.)
Personally, I take a similar attitude, but that sort of thing seems pretty at odds with Japan's usual culture.
Tasting History. Guy goes through old recipe books fromthe last century to the classical world. Not a professional chef, so it's relatable for us amateurs.
Anti-Chef. Canadian guy moved around a lot and cooked while he did so. I started off hating him, because he was very inexperienced (the very first videos from when he was in Canada are hilarious - the vanilla bean episode is now famous) and wasted good quality ingredients because he had no idea what the heck he was doing. But time and practice worked their magic, and he has come on by leaps and bounds.
Viva La Dirt League. Bunch of New Zealanders who started off doing amateur comedy skits about gaming and, well, now they do semi-pro comedy skits about gaming.
I'm already subscribed to Baumgartner Restoration, Tasting History, and Anti-Chef.
Although on the latter, I've not been as interested as he's gained more and more competence. I actually preferred the very relatable and sometimes spectacular failures, as well as the only neutral to moderate successes. Competent cooks are legion across YouTube.
What I don't like is that he frames Soros's humanitarian activities as little more than a Plot for World Domination. That seem to me to be the sort of discourse that falls well below the standards here.
I think I know a few people in the rationalist community who would say that plotting for World Optimization is the obviously right thing to do.
Factually, I agree that Soros uses his money to optimize the world towards his values. I just happen to agree with most of those values. (Not all of them, e.g. the increase of crime.) And I am happy that there is a person like that, because most people with comparable amounts of money optimize *against* my values. But technically speaking, it is what it is.
Okay, but which videos and/or topics present narratives which are "absolutely false?"
Like I said, that is a a broad and absolute statement for a channel which covers many different topics with most videos extensively citing sources. I'm not sure how you get from conceding sources are cited to asserting that the conclusions pulled from that information being "absolutely false."
The range of topics covered has absolutely no affect on the truthfulness of said coverage.
I’ll give an example: the atlas earth video (first one I clicked on) miscalculates the earnings from a parcel (you can have better than common parcels), misrepresents the meaning of slave over and over again (forced, unpaid labor) - this is not forced, and you can exit or join at-will. Sure, it’s a terrible ROI, but the video treats it as something interesting, not just the daily “crypto metaverse bad investment”, describes a multiplying effect as “exponentially more” (there are no exponents involved, yet he clearly understands what this means at 8:45). It acts as if the fact that the way the pay works is not obvious to every user. It assumes that HYSA rates will continue to be high for 5 years (obviously false). Also, it has a sponsorship for honeygain, which is known for not having great practices (ask Claude, too long to put here), and acts as if it is a website he found and conveniently got an affiliate link, not a direct sponsorship (illegal in the us). Sure, it has sources, but you would not be informed by watching the video.
Well, as I said, I don't care about or watch any of UE's video game essays, but the coverage of other, much broader-interest topics (Roblox, etc) seems sufficiently thorough and well-documented, albeit with a point of view.
Russia eventually agrees to a ceasefire that lets them rip off a big chunk of Ukraine's territory that they occupy or nearly so. That then gets annexed into Russia, like Karelia from Finland in the Winter War.
I think Russia is very likely to win. I don't know if this victory is going to be pyrrhic or not, but a scenario where Ukraine regains its 2014 borders requires a collapse of Russia's economy and state failure.
The main variable that will determine if Russia achieves a pyrrhic victory or a true victory is whether Ukraine's manpower shortage will allow Russia to make a breakthrough. If Ukraine's lines break, Russia will be able to attain its maximalist aims since I don't think Europe will send troops to save Ukraine from collapse. However, if Ukraine manages to hold on long enough, eventually Russia will reach a point where it will drop its maximalist objectives and try to settle for a ceasefire along the line of control. There's also a chance that Ukraine manages to damage Russia's oil infrastructure enough to stop exports and oil refining, which would cripple Russia and perhaps cause its lines to crumble.
My personal odds are 60-30-10, with 60% for a maximalist Russian victory, 30% for a pyrrhic Russian victory and 10% for all other outcomes such as a mutual defeat, a Ukrainian victory or WW3.
After some more months or years of static frontlines, very slowly crawling forward in Donbass, Russia will eventually drop maximalist demands and reach a ceasefire with Ukraine (who will jump at any proposal that don't require them to give up unconquered land).
It will be seen as a geopolitical pyrrhic victory for Russia, which will feel it's cost for the next 10 or 20 years.
Sanctions will at least partly get lifted in exchange for freeing POW or returning ukrainian children that were deported.
Ukraine will be on life support, out of NATO & EU bust still recipient to significant aid & cooperation.
The big winners will be China (who will reap the non-western arm selling business) and Eastern Europe (who will be relieved of the threat of a mechanized Russian blitz that could topple them before NATO could react).
I also slightly expect western armies to be much more hesitant to engage in force projection like in Libya, Syria or the Sahel, fearing a drone warfare for which they are unprepared.
How much territory? All of the Donbass? Everything East of the Dnieper? That plus all of Kiev? All of Ukraine? Any of the above could be said to constitute a `Russian win' but would result in very different worlds going forward.
My guess would be an eventual frozen conflict where Russia ends up with most/all of the Donbass, but not more. This could be spun as a`Russian win' but would probably be a pyrrhic one if so.
1 Ukrainian reforms of the army and force generation pipeline, particularly force retention.
2 Western aid, if it will increase, drop or remain constant
3 the Russian political will and understanding that the longer the war goes on the higher the long term cost is going to be.
If 1 improves for Ukraine, 2 aid increases and 3 Russian economy and power status is threatened the war might end even start of 2026 through successful negotiations due to the Cremlin accepting it risks far more in a continuation then otherwise.
If instead the opposite happens with 1 reforms fail 2 western aid (and Ukrainian production) decreases and 3 sufficient power in Russia is held by those who gain from a continuing war at the expense of Russian's general long term wellfare. Then the war will be longer and probably end with severe Ukrainian (and EU/US) concessions.
Currently we are in a middle situation with a lot of potential changing factors though generally positive for Russia since it's paying a continuous cost not a growing one and therefore has no incentives to negotiate seriously (in other words it can always try to win on the battlefield or in the white house and if it fails what did it cost trying? Nothing that wasn't being spent before)
Generally speaking we can talk about self sabotage from Russia as the party which started this useless and costly invasion, Europe as too slow moving and fragmented until now, ,Ukraine too slow on force generation and the US foreign policy was first characterized as far too timid and now, honestly now it's just chaos or utter naivety.
No the stalemate as it is can't continue for several years (more then 3) because with current intensity it's almost impossible for either countries to fight that long.
I'm from Georgia, and I know Georgia has a certain somewhat unusual feature, and I guess maybe the others have it too? Trbetvn'f ynetrfg pvgl vf nyfb vgf pncvgny.
Would never have possibly got it without the hint, got it almost immediately after looking at the hint.
I think these sorts of puzzles largely test whether the reader happens to be on a similar thought-association wavelength as the puzzle maker. Which makes them often pretty frustrating to me, as I often don't think in the same way as other people.
(Hey, this comment has an unintentional hint to your puzzle as well, which I noticed just before submitting it...)
I spent an absolutely unreasonable amount of time writing an essay about how many perceived cultural problems are actually caused by dysfunctional copyright law.
It's culture war related, but it's actually "anti-war", in that my answer to "is the new official Tolkien adaptation too woke?" is "Tolkien's writings should be in the public domain, and everyone should be able to create one to their taste".
I propose reducing copyright terms and making copyright conditional on use (so that you can't keep content "in the vault" indefinitely)
the problem is that reducing copyright reduces the desire to spend money in creating, marketing, and maintaining works. Public domain things are garbage: people want things in the public domain that have a lot of time, effort, and money spent on them to know they exist.
take thar away and people will forget Tolkien, because its not worth putting money into beyond a minimum amount. Andre Norton, for example.
One potential answer to this concern is not to reduce the duration of copyright law, but limit it a lot more strictly in how broad the protections are. If you create something great that people love, you should be able to get paid for it. But maybe other people should also trivially be able to make derivative works, as long as they aren't literally just copying the good thing you made. The literal text of the Lord of the Ring books should be protected, but maybe it should be allowed to write different books in the same universe. Most fanfic is garbage, but if someone has the skill and takes the time to make a good version, maybe they should be allowed to make money on that too.
thats not good. copyright is also creative control.
a book that introduced me to postmodernism was Otaku: Database Animals. It used Evangelion as an example, and what it pointed out is that otaku ignore the actual work and strip mine the characters or situations to turn to their own ends.
With evangelion, asuka went from a very damaged girl to a typical tsundere, for example. Otaku turned it into a dress up set to play with their own lesser ideas and the infamous hospital scene in the end of evangelion was how Anno saw the fans.
a usa example was Calvin and Hobbes: calvin is a trickster but the whole bootleg calvin merchandise involving him peeing on things can change how you view him into much more of a gremlin than intended.
people will treat art worse, just as things for them to use and often for worse ends; hell the rationalists did this with HPMOR, turning harry into a horrible person. its bad enough now, monetizing this officially and dear god, you'd watch your creations be violated and people paid for it, and even it eclipse your work.
My retort to that would be "if we're going to get more Rings of Power style versions, then I want even *stricter* copyright law".
The problem is not 'it's not in the public domain', the problem is "the version this lot decided upon was not based on the work but on the perceived audience, so they put the cart before the horse and didn't even get the right cart while they were at it".
Looks good, commented in the comments there. I think your point is valid (and you're probably right), but lobbying power means it probably won't come to pass.
Very interesting that the Authors thought that was in Scott’s voice. It was much more mean spirited and less funny than anything Scott’s written. I wonder if they had an AI write it with that prompt?
People here love stereotype accuracy, but I can think of at least one case where the common stereotype is both wrong and harmful: my mental illness, OCD.
Can't bear to think of how many people got no help or the wrong help for years because "OCD is about cleanliness" or whatever.
Surely not the only inaccurate stereotype of a mental illness.
This seems more or less similar to other types of stereotypes, in that it's not universally accurate, and maybe not true of a majority of cases, but it still reflects a genuinely representative case. Insofar as it's inaccurate, I think we could say other stereotypes are also inaccurate.
I agree this is not the main or most relevant presentation of OCD, but it describes OCPD okay, and OCD and OCPD tend to co-occur, see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23865406/.
So although I don't think this is an accurate *description* of OCD, it might be a (somewhat) accurate *stereotype* of OCD *people*.
Yeah I know as much. I've just known so many fellow OCD'ers with very common themes like taboo violent-sexual thoughts, moral scrupolosity etc who didn't get help for so long just because it wasn't "stereotypical".
I'm also a person with OCD who is 0% OCPD. Seriously. I don't have a gram of that type of perfectionism in my body and also score really low on conscientiousness. That might not be common but we do exist.
As someone whose son has been diagnosed with OCD, I'd be interested if you wanted to share what kind treatment or other kind of help you'd recommend for the condition?
I highly recommend you check out the International OCD Foundation website at iocdf.org. There are *many* excellent resources there, including descriptions of different forms of OCD, a therapist-finder (and most of those who list there have actual specialized training and certification in OCD treatment), and videos made by people who've suffered from OCD. They offer in-person and virtual camps for kids in and teens with OCD, and have several big conferences yearly where clinicians, researchers, OCD sufferers and their families all meet and attend seminars together. They are well-funded and manage to keep prices moderate, and also offer a lot of free resources. Oh, yeah, also: The same people who founded the iocdf set up an inpatient treatment center at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts 25 or so years ago. Patients there get expert psychopharmacology and participate in an all-day program of CBT, including several hours/day of ERP. It's like boot camp, but with kindly and good-natured staff.
I'm a psychologist OCD specialist and agree with everything Whenyou said.
ERP and/or maybe ACT. And just in general someone who has experience with OCD. Regular talk therapy as well as psychoanalysis (and therapists just treating it as anxiety) can actually make it worse, as it's often too enabling/supportive/encourages obsessing over your thoughts.
Ultimately OCD therapy is supposed to be frustrating and uncomfortable. Confessing your thoughts can in itself become a ritual. It's completely normal for a therapist to say to an OCD patient, "now we shouldn't talk about that fear of yours anymore. I can feel you obsessing".
One of the mildest SSRIs helped me a lot too.
The app Nocd is supposedly good for finding OCD-friendly therapists.
Are you staying on SSRIs? I feel like SSRIs might help to reduce intrusive thoughts, I started taking it when I felt worse, but now feel better and thinking of stopping.
Anorexia is like this: the stereotype is that it afflicts young girls who desperately want to be thin. True in many cases, but it wasn't for me! None of the resources seemed applicable as a result.
How much of "burnout" can be explained by your unconscious mind slowly noticing that the exorbitant levels of focus, attention and willpower it's been giving you haven't translated into better food, sex, shelter, status or any other meaningful goal, and so it simply decides not to provide them anymore?
I think there are really 2 classes of "rewards" in life: straightfoward pleasure (food, sex, nice belongings) and a work pleasure (feeling of deep engagement and commitment to a project, satisfaction when it is successfully completed). If you can get some of the second kind of pleasure out of work, you are much less vulnerable to burnout.
"meaningful goal" is carrying a lot of weight there. Meaningful goal can be the project I'm spending lots of time on in which case I'm less likely to burnout.
In modern society sometimes things get too abstract. My salary definitely provides me a lot of food, but the link is too indirect. As a straight guy in IT I don't really expect to have sex at workplace.
So it seems mostly about status. Whether you are treated with respect, whether the work environment is friendly, etc.
I heard that it helps if people visualize their salaries, for example if they make a graph, and see how they are getting closer to some specific target, whether it is a new car, or retirement. Then they get a reward each month by seeing the line get closer to the goal.
I've only ever heard "burnout" used to refer to fields like software development, where the chance physical exhaustion is basically zero. In fact, exercise is often raised as a good way to stave off burnout.
Plausible, but you can still parlay with your unconscious mind with CBT. I don't enjoy my job frankly but my boss will retire in a couple of years so more status/money is a plausible goal. But keeping my unconscious mind on board with that weak resolution is a constant battle.
Recently, the book "Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse" was published by Luke Kemp. In it, Kemp describes his ideas of how collapse happens. I think it nicely summarizes the state of the art of collapse research. If you want to find out more about it, I wrote a summary: https://existentialcrunch.substack.com/p/the-peoples-history-of-collapse
I really didn’t like a lot of that. Saying that the Roman Empire fell because of inequality doesn’t really have much explanatory power, it was unequal for centuries, the late republic was just as unequal. This means that inequality is bad for democracy, but not destabilising in empires.
The empire was more stable than the republic (hence the rise of the empire). The empire was considerable less imperial - paradoxically
I didn't read the book and so can only comment on your review. Not sure you can discuss societal collapse in past societies without even mentioning demographic considerations (good times leading to population growth which outstrips the available resources given negligible growth in the pre-modern times, per Turchin and others).
It would be good to see more evidence for the claim that democratic participation makes societies more resilient. The experience of Ancient Greece and medieval Italy is not that positive and most of the modern democracies are pretty young
s/population/elite/, if you want to invoke Turchin.
(And your examples of democracies are rather cherry-picked - for ancient Greece, you have ancient Rome, for medieval Italy, medieval-and-onwards Switzerland. Besides, conceptually, the claim that democratic participation increases society's robustness is kind of self-evident, and the key word is participation. Democratic facade for extremely unequal society captured by oligarchs, as was the case with medieval Italy, isn't even a proper counterexample of that. Democratic procedures alone probably don't mean much, granted, but that's a different issue.)
There was no single democratic ancient Greece. There were hundreds of poleis, most of them had democratic and non-democratic periods and among the most famous and longest-surviving ones there were both mostly democratic (like Athens) and mostly non-democratic poleis (like Syracuse). You're right that this claim *sounds* self-evident, and possibly if someone did a careful study of all the poleis they'd found this patter, but it's hardly obvious. Not sure Rome is a good example either, its imperial period is comparable to its republican period in length (depending on where you begin and where you end).
Florian did share a couple of links to scholarly studies below, I'll def take a look at them.
The there’s Rome. It’s clear that Rome was incredibly unequal at the end of the republic, to a degree that would make even modern capitalists wince. Although libertarians might have liked the entrepreneurial abilities of Crassus, who used his private firefighters to “rescue” property that was ablaze by offering to put the fire out at the cost of buying the house immediately for a pittance, which as better than nothing.
The wars and political violence of the late republic (including the existential social wars with the Italian tribes) were primarily caused by social unrest and ended with a victory for the rich, with Sulla and later the empire. Afterwards the poor were bought off with bread and circus.
So there’s a lesson there, perhaps, remembering that Rome took its democracy and republic extremely seriously until the empire ( and even pretended the institutions mattered afterwards, Augustus was a consul - a shared office - for at least a decade)
> Although libertarians might have liked the entrepreneurial abilities of Crassus, who used his private firefighters to “rescue” property that was ablaze by offering to put the fire out at the cost of buying the house immediately for a pittance, which as better than nothing
I've heard this story but now I'm reading it again I'm not convinced it makes that much sense.
The cost of a house is two things: the cost of the actual structure and the cost of the land it sits on. In major economically important cities today, the cost of the land usually exceeds the value of the actual structure, and I'm guessing it was the same deal in Rome (since Rome was a huge economically dominant city navigable only on foot the cost of land close to the centre of town must have been enormous). The value of the land puts a fairly high floor on the amount you'd be willing to sell to Crassus for.
I can really recommend checking out the book. It provides endless historical examples and case studies to make sure that the conclusions are robust.
I also think it does not really conflict with Turchin's idea. You could have both things happening at the same time and both theories point to wealth inequality being a very important factor for societal stability and thus collapse.
But if you want to check our more about the link between societal stability and democratic participation, I summarized some papers about this here (and many of those also show up in Kemp's sources):
Well, the post summarizes a specific book and is not meant to give an overview of societal collapse in general. If you want that, look this post: https://existentialcrunch.substack.com/p/mapping-out-collapse-research There I also discuss Tainter. You will also find mentions of Tainter throughout my other writing on the blog.
https://youtu.be/ujsw_bSbD1I I find this video funny in context of, this is what happens if GlaDOS is successfully aligned before anything horrible happens.
Question people! How did the squat and deadlift kind of exercise got so popular, as opposed to traditional body-building, and why is it kinda linked to the Manosphere and Dissident Right?
To me squat and deadlift are the strength of a pack mule, I would not define strength that way, I would define strength as throwing a punch, or historically a spear, so arms and shoulders. Not incidentally, that is how a man looks good, not by having a huge ass and thighs.
Do the squat and deadlift exercises have a psychological benefit? Or they are just good at keep fat away?
If you deadlift and squat instead of chiseling your triceps on the cable and talking about your arm circumference like a traditional body-builder (in the beach boy sense of traditional body-builder, not like people who actually compete) - why?
I am off to the gym in 10 minutes, today it is leg press machine, stomach machine, chest press machine and triceps machine. Tomorrow will be back and bicep and stomach again. These deliver the looks and the health. These deliver strength in the sense of looking like a boxer who hits hard. These do not deliver strength in the sense of carrying loads like a pack mule -but why should I ever need that kind of strength?
My theory, off the cuff and not to be taken seriously:
they're easily quantifiable,
form is easy to evaluate since the Big Three lifts are the standard for strongman competition,
they have a large systemic effect since they involve the comparatively huge muscles of the lower body and with a barbell touch like 2/3 of muscle groups by count, so they make you feel good,
the learning curve is very rewarding early on even for a weak lifter because there's significant gains available from pure form improvement,
due to all of these there's cargo culting about how they're essential components of a serious beginner routine, or at least unavoidable.
Due to all of the above, advancement and correctness are legible to autism-spec people who don't have a social network to get feedback or reinforcement on correctness or, uh, I guess virtue or status-increase-from-an-action of their work in the gym.
The manosphere association is also multifactorial, and I think falls out of them being starter moves and the direction of the sum of theses of the manosphere being that the world is built wrong for you, but if you work hard on yourself you can get good enough to find happiness in it anyway, either by leveling up your sexual game, acquiring virtue by self-improvement in bodily health, or actualizing your own ambition.
I can't speak for where the broader right-wing association with strength training came from, or why combat sports don't seem to have grown an association with that faction.
> If you deadlift and squat instead of chiseling your triceps on the cable and talking about your arm circumference like a traditional body-builder (in the beach boy sense of traditional body-builder, not like people who actually compete) - why?
1. Only squats and deadlifts will increase your bone density, which is important and one of the primary benefits of resistance exercise.
2. Deadlifts in particular are a great proxy for "functional strength," ie. the strength you use to lift a piece of furniture, or whisk your SO off their feet, or grab a big luggage and run up or down some stairs. It's the type of strength that actually impresses on people "oh, that guy is strong."
3. You can absolutely get shredded doing squats and deadlifts - back when I was competing, I was so shredded people at pool parties of both genders would come up and ask to get pictures with me, and I never did any "cosmetic" lifts, just lots of Big 5.
Unless you live a very interesting life, you need to carry heavy loads far more often than you need to throw punches. Think grocery shopping, moving furniture, that sort of thing.
Also, in a lot of martial arts, you generate power for strikes from the whole chain of the body and not just your arms.
I'm new to weightlifting, and I'm all about the squats and deadlifts. It's because my hobby is a the sport of powerlifting, which focuses on maxing out big compound lifts- squat, bench, and deadlift are the big three. It's not bodybuilding. It's more about seeing number go up than about getting shredded.
UK perspective and I wouldn't know about the vaguely political stuff. I'd say both deadlifts and esp squats seems to be a little more common now than in the gyms of, say, 25 years ago. I'd guess this is more people taking online advice, either in silly places or from people who know what they are talking about.
More importantly, I have no doubt at all that there are significant numbers of people doing these exercises who absolutely shouldn't be. Form is terrible and they are storing up problems.
I lift to increase muscle so I get general health benefits, including less pressure on joints as I age. Also building muscle anywhere increases metabolism.
I believe there is some gym rat cachet to barbell squats because they look (and probably are) dangerous but I stick to dumbbells.
I have the same mentality, just with machines, as they guide me and thus require less attention. Impossible to lose form on a leg press. This also means I can go heavier than I could if there would be a chance of say falling over.
Just because they aren't visible, doesn't mean your back muscles aren't important. If your limb muscles are massive but your back is weak, you will injure your back a lot.
Here's a guess: On 4chan /fit/ there was a big (meme?) culture around squatting and deadlifting circa 2010. A lot of it evolved from ridiculing a book called "Starting Strength" by a guy named Rippetoe. And as it was 4chan, the memeing also tied in gay-bashing, misogyny, inceldom, etc
I have no idea what population size this is (dozens? thousands?), but if you were a teenage boy at that time (like i was) on that message board, you're now an adult man who may have internalized some manosphere/redpill ideas from that ecosystem.
I was there, Gandalf, 3500 years ago when cries of "squats and oats" echoed through the halls of /fit/.
/Fit/ was my fav board so I spent a lot of time there. I do not have the impression there was red pill/manosphere stuff there then. I remember the over the top sexism (and every other -ism), but it wasn't bitter and more like a lot of teenage boys trying to sound menacing. The overall vibe was one of "we're all gonna make it" with zyzz at the head.
I figured out my life, partly thanks to the fitness knowledge I gained from /fit/, and moved on so I didn't see the evolution of what happened and not super interested in how the place looks now. But back then it was a weird, fun place, maybe a little like Bushwick in NYC--dirty and you might get stabbed or a wall might fall on you, and there were quite a few creeps, but most people were really out doing themselves making funny or useful memes.
Correct, I do not get out of the chair except for the gym i.e. the machines, and I do that because if I stay 100% in the chair all the time I feel 30 years older than I am.
> is the best natural way to increase testosterone production
Thanks, this is exactly what I expected when I wrote that there might be a psychological benefit! I remember the very early years of PUA, when it was not so toxic yet, and thus a mainstreamish media had an interview with Roosh, the title was something like "sex tourist discovers weight lifting" and there was a pic of Roosh squatting heavy.
Now I already figured that he does not do it because women like muscular thighs or anything, but rather it somehow makes him feel manlier, confident or something like this. Generally machine based, upper body focus body-building makes me feel manlier, too, but perhaps this sort of stuff works more in that direction.
I've just come back from a wedding, and during the service I noticed they've changed the lyrics of the hymns from the versions I know. They weren't random variations, every single change was made to eliminate "man", "men", "son", etc in favour of a gender-neutral alternative. I am unastounded to notice this.
What did surprise me was that apparently any references to Christ or Jesus also merited removal.
I am really curious about the subjective experience of the decision-maker here. I will assume this person still calls themselves a Christian. What does the progression feel like, as one ideology totally replaces another, without your even noticing the change?
All I can say is that Protestants have a long history of changing things around a lot, so this does not surprise me at all. A Catholic or Orthodox wedding probably sticks to the traditions (rules, even).
Now removing Christ from a Christian ceremony is surprising, Protestant change-orientedness is really not supposed to go that far... at that point why even sing hymns? Our wedding intro was the Star Wars Imperial March, and everybody was laughing their butts off. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsMWVW4xtwI&list=RDvsMWVW4xtwI&start_radio=1
>They weren't random variations, every single change was made to eliminate "man", "men", "son", etc in favour of a gender-neutral alternative.
In many but not all cases, this may be truer to the original meaning. "Man" has both a gemder-neutral and a gendered sense, with the former dominant in the distant past, with a separate word, "were" (as in "weregeld" and "werewolf") specifically meaning adult male human. The gendered sense of "man" is now strongly dominant and newer gemder-neutral turns of phrase have arisen to replace the gemder-neutral sense of the word.
Makes sense. Old-time English was probably highly similar to German, which has two words, der Mann for men, and "man" as a generic subject, similar to "one" in English, "one does not simply walk into Mordor" "man wird nicht einfach in Mordor reinspazieren"
I don't generally get as far as asking that - I invariably get stuck on "why do so many people who do not otherwise believe in Christianity specifically want a religious wedding service in a Christian church?"
Not everyone "gets" religion in a real sense, whether conservative or liberal. A lot don't even consider it.
It's hard to explain. Fundamentalists kind of come close with silly analogies. A lot of people really do think they are cars because they are in a garage: if you are in a church or are trained as a pastor you are one; but the content just bounces off.
not in a "thoughtful heretic" way, they just live according to the values of their culture and religion acts as sort of a part of that.
the situationists use "recuperate"'as how capitalism transforms subcultures to reflect its values, but culture in general can recuperate religion in similar ways.
People should spend more time with anthropology as a subject. They should know something about human intuitions about continuity with the past, rituals, and sacred art or objects to know that maintaining the original forms is part of the social magic that enables a true feeling of transcendence.
Of course, the people the vote for these kinds of changes are the first to tell you that anthropology is strictly white man colonialism or something.
I can never get over the change I saw to Hark the Herald Angels Sing: "born to raise the sons of earth" to "born to raise us from the earth" (or something like that). Removing poetry from an artwork should be a crime, let alone when you don't bother even trying to come up with a vaguely poetic replacement. (I think they also changed "pleased as man with man to dwell" to something completely banal).
And worst of all, it's not like there aren't *real* problems in Christianity to maybe have a look at. (See my reply to Rob). The hills people choose to die on are enough to make me welcome the AI/nuclear/climate/whatever-the-latest-is apocalypse because I've utterly lost faith in humanity.
I'm not surprised by the "man" and "son" stuff - my old Reconstructionist synagogue tacked on a prayer about the Matriarchs to the traditional prayer about the Patriarchs way back in the 1990s.
I'm pretty shocked that they managed to remove Jesus, though. What exactly were these hymns? What did they do with the part where Jesus was supposed to appear? "Praise Be To Somebody, But We're Not Sure Who"?
Pretty much. For example the "Christ of my own heart" at the end of Be Thou My Vision became something something "all our dear hearts".
Unfortunately I didn't trouble to remember the replacement lyrics, because I was too busy judging the female vicar. My sexist objection to her mere existence aside: the one rule at a wedding is Do Not Upstage The Bride. Someone should have had a quiet word with her about how the bride might feel to walk in and find another woman in a brilliant white gown already standing there at the altar.
Your example in Be Thou My Vision might just be general variation in the lyrics, rather than a specific change. I can find various versions of the hymn online, and I have always sung "heart of my own heart" where I imagine you have "Christ of my own heart".
For example I can see the version on https://hymnary.org/hymn/HDDW2024/268 has "heart of my heart" (presumably the 'own' has been erroneously omitted).
If this was a liberal mainline church (PC[USA], ELCA, UMC, Episcopalian, etc) I've been under the impression that the clergy have been running to the theological "left" for some time, and the death or departure of more-traditionally minded congregants has enabled these kind of changes. In this sense, the decision maker is staying true to what his/her theology says.
I left the PC[USA] after a bunch of changes like this. God as a woman I can maybe tolerate. Once you start wavering on salvation only through Christ, the church has left the building IMO.
Sorry for the aggressive reply, but from my perspective you just said that pointless political signalling which helps no one (and arguably makes a mockery of coherent theology[1]) you can tolerate, but questioning a doctrine (all non-believers will burn in hell[2]) that causes unimaginable psychological suffering and has a strong claim to being the most evil idea that has ever been formulated, you can't.
The hills people will choose to die on, among all the possible such hills, disturb me more than I can describe.
([1] God as a man is obviously metaphysically incoherent if taken literally, but it's easy to interpret as a metaphor. Once you change God to a woman it's much harder to see as intended metaphor, since why would someone make the change if they think it's just metaphorical? It suggests they either view God as a physical being, or are trying to hijack theology to propogate gender ideology.)
([2] or even "merely" permanently destroyed, which compared to hell looks wonderfully humane, but what does it say about Christianity when something that's several thousand times worse than the Holocaust is the humane alternative?)
I don't understand your point. Even non-Christian sources like Tacitus or Flavius describe Jesus as clearly male. It is more or less a historic fact that a man with a similar name was preaching there and got crucified. The faith-based and likely metaphorical aspect is that that man was also god.
I guess the answer to why (non-theologically) that I think of is that Jesus was begotten of God and Mary (and there was no technology to have a child any other way than male/female pairings back then)
Throughout human history and across all cultures, but particularly first century Judea, mothers and fathers have different roles. Fathers strong, protective, authoritative, mothers are soft, nurturing, etc. Jesus is telling us that we should consider our relationship with God to be fatherish rather than motherish.
I can think of other religions with a father-god (Zeus, Odin) but few with a mother-god. Possibly because fathers are expected to be a bit distant whereas mothers aren't. Sometimes the Earth itself is conceptualised as a mother.
This seems to be the correct answer. Even in my childhood, the basic parental setup was that mothers do not punish children, they threaten misbehaving children of telling it to their fathers, who will then administer punishment.
Thus a fatherly god is strict, punishing, tough love.
A motherly god would rather provide free food and heal the sick. Although thinking of it it is interesting Jesus said to have done exactly that! Jesus was very non-manly by the standards of the era, generally forgiving instead of judgemental, caregiving and so on. The only warrior-like act chasing out the money changers etc. actually strange.
Salvation solely through Jesus is *the* central truth claim of Christianity. I don't see any way around that.
There's a saying among several denominations: "In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty." While I think changing God's pronouns is an eye-roll concession to changing social norms, I'm willing to say it falls into a non-essential category.
I feel like solely comes with an asterisk there; the bible does lay out other ways for the descendants of Abraham to be forgiven of their sins. I agree that it's a mushier point that will get some debate though.
> Salvation solely through Jesus is the central truth claim of Christianity.
No, Christ is the Messiah, and he's gonna come back, bring on the end-times, and whup the collective asses of anyone who doesn't accept his love. That is the central truth of Christianity. 2 Thess 2:8 comes immediately to mind.
Plenty of universalist Christians would disagree strongly with that. At least the ones who haven't been viciously bullied out of the mainstream church and pushed into using some term like "Jesusist" instead of "Christian" because of said bullying.
Again, the fact that pro-choice Christians and pro-transitioning-toddlers Christians seem more tolerated than universalist Christians (at least, while I've seen hatred for the former from mainstream evangelicals, it's absolutely dwarfed by the hatred I've seen for the latter) makes me lose faith in humanity.
(There's a possible motte-and-bailey around "salvation only through Christ", where it could mean that Christ's death saved everyone (or everyone except the absolute most evil and hard-hearted people), or it could mean that everyone who doesn't become a Christian in this life is damned. So wavering on the doctrine could mean saying that Christ wasn't actually metaphysically necessary, or that salvation isn't limited to those who believe in Christ in their lifetime. I suppose it's possible you meant the first, in which case my apologies for my irrelevant response, but based on my experience of these discussions my prior is at least 90% that you meant the second).
there aren't really a lot of universalist Christians in the sense you mean.
Universalism still means hell exists and Christ saved us from it, but extended to all and patiently waits till you receive it, if after death. There is still an act of the will to receive it, and possibly some afterlife where those who can't exist, but universalism is rare and idk modern proponents.
Universalism i think still believes sin is separation from God and there is punishment, but that in the end all will be well. Like it still believes in traditional ideas about free will or why jesus needed to be sacrificed.
peope dont like unitarian universalists, which are not christian at all: you can be atheist an be one.
christian universalism
though is a decent position, but its rarely argued: George Mac Donald's Lilith is where I encountered it, and its extremely poetic.
I'm kinda laughing here at "don't dare promulgate that tired old notion of Hell, that's fine to dump it - but what do you mean they changed the lyrics of a 19th century hymn? Heresy! Blasphemy!"
I do think the gender-neutral language stuff can go too far, but that has been happening from way back.
I'm surprised about the "dump any mentions of Jesus" but then a lot of liberal churches are 'welcoming' to the 'questioning' and maybe they feel that terms like "Jesus" are much too dogmatic for someone not even sure about this whole God thing in the first place. So make it that the songs are changed to be modern and anyone can sing along without having to make a doctrinal statement and everything is good now.
>I'm kinda laughing here at "don't dare promulgate that tired old notion of Hell, that's fine to dump it - but what do you mean they changed the lyrics of a 19th century hymn? Heresy! Blasphemy!"
I mean, do you laugh at the suggestion that actually slavery and torturous executions of petty thieves were horifically evil but historical love stories that were too "heteronormative" are...not? Do you laugh at the suggestion that serial rapist-murderers should be treated a fair bit harsher than kids who shoplifted a few candy bars? Because that's the level of moral equivalence we're talking about here.
I don't know if I want to know if you believe in hell. This is something that I try to forget about people, because the alternative is having to face up to the fact that a large number of my fellow citizens and neighbours are sadistic monsters to an unimaginable degree. Like, there's just no way someone with anything resembling a conscience, posessing even the tiniest shred of moral decency or empathy, could believe in that. Right??? I don't know how to interpret your casually dismissive response "kinda laughing" to this issue, but to be honest it greatly disturbs me.
Depends on the denomination, but I think it's a "one funeral at a time" thing. Most clergy seem to develop their basic ideas at seminary. Some move with the times or get mugged by reality - Pope Francis got more liberal over time and Benedict more conservative. But the laity are important too - hymns are often chosen by the music director who may have lived in the parish for decades while priests change every 5 years. Again this person will have got reform-pilled and remain fixed in their views for a while, however sudden and radical it seems when you’re visiting that parish.
The weird truth is they most certainly don't experience it as an ideological shift - they are discovering the true Christianity which empties itself as Christ did on the cross, it's the "rigid" people who want Jesus in the hymns who are the pharisees.
Edit: This article is an interesting take on ultra-reform Christianity. Money quote: "It is not Christian to be Christian"
I know unsolicited parenting advice is hardly ever well-received. Nevertheless... do you think that distraction is the right approach when a child wants something they can't have? I think it's important to teach them to manage their emotions, even at that early an age, and to respect others.
Here's an example from the animal realm that captures the crucial distinction. My cats used to jump on my back with their claws out. (They weren't attacking, just treating me like a tree trunk.) When they did I yelled and immediately stood up and shook them off. The yell gave them an unpleasant start, and being shaken off immediately ended their fun. This unpleasant consequence quickly taught them not to jump on my back.
There's another thing they do that I also dislike: Their meowing for attention when I'm concentrating hard on some task on the computer. I don't mind the meowing in other situations. There is no way to teach them not to make a racket when I'm concentrating because they are not capable of recognizing when I'm concentrating. Also, meowing, while not involuntary, is a natural, deeply wired-in behavior they emit a much of the time. Since trying to teach them not to meow when I'm concentrating is impossible, I use distraction to keep them quiet. I give them food puzzles and other distractions.
When it comes to teaching kids to do or not to do something, there's the same principle at work. You can only teach them if they can grasp what the something is, and if they have enough self-monitoring capacity and self-control to refrain from doing the something. Scott's kids are too little to learn and follow the lesson that it is bad to yank things away from your sibling. If he sternly admonishes them or punishes them with a little time out, they will become more uneasy around toys, their sibling, and him, but they will not learn the particular lesson he wants to target.
For 1.5 year olds? Yes. Yes it is. If your kids are older now you may be projecting an ability to reason backwards... That is, my 3.5 year old can, at times, be reasoned with. My 1.5 year old just doesn't have the understanding necessary for that to be a meaningful conversation.
I think people underestimate how much even a one year old understands. But anyway, it's not about reasoning only, it's about learning behaviours. They certainly learn that if you give in every time they shout, they should keep shouting.
So what do you think of my cat example? (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-397/comment/151338000) Am I being too soft on my cats by giving up on teaching them not to make a racket when I'm concentrating? Am I teaching them that meowing when I'm concentrating gets them food puzzles with treats in them?
Oh, come on! It's a thought experiment. You don't need to be highly familiar with cats to understand it. The relevant point is that cats cannot distinguish between me sitting in a chair relaxed and available and me sitting in a chair concentrating hard on a project. Feel free to substitute any mammal you like except maybe a very smart near-relative of our species like a chimp. The point is that there are a things you cannot teach a non-human mammal to do because it cannot recognize crucial features of the thing you want to teach. In this case, it can't distinguish between a sitting person who is concentrating and needs silence and one who is relaxed and does not object to some noise and attempts at interaction.
Ok right but this isn't applicable to children, for two reasons. First, kids understand more than you give them credit for. Second, what, you think kids hit a certain age, and suddenly you start reasoning with them? It's a gradual process, so you should begin reasoning right from the start. Otherwise, a) you yourself develop bad parenting habits you won't shake off, and b) you won't know when to start.
I'm sure he does not give in every time they shout. If he stops them from doing something dangerous, like standing on the edge of a table, he has to just put up with the yells of frustration. In my experience with very small toddlers you need to stop them from doing what they want to very often, certainly more than once an hour, out of safety considerations alone. If you didn't, they'd be falling off the back of the couch, mouthing plastic spoons they found on the ground outdoors, grabbing cactus plants, etc etc. multiple times per day. He's also tolerating excitement shouting, and frustration shouting at times when he can't figure out what it is the kid wants. So the kids are learning that sometimes shouting gets you want you want and sometimes it does not. That, by the way, is true at all ages, even in adult life, although of course the conditions under which it works and doesn't work follow very complex rules in adult life. I think they're getting the best approximation of the truth that's possible for such young beings.
Also, Scott probably tries to anticipate things that are going to lead to frustration yelling, and intervene before the yelling starts by making sure the kid who is about to be frustrated gets an alternative toy that distracts them. So the kid's experience in that situation is not that yelling gets them what they want but that life is fun and good and wonderful, fascinating things pop up all the time.
So the contingicies are nowhere near as simple as what you sketched in.
In such examples, I would tell the child trying to snatch a toy from their sibling to stop it, and wait for their turn. I am not saying I wouldn't offer alternatives, but I'd have the discussion with them ('you shouldn't want something just because other people have it; you can't take things by force. Wait for your turn - and if you're bored, you can play with X/Y/Z in the meantime').
You expect a 1.5 year old toddler to understand phrases like "by force" and "if you're bored" and "wait your turn"? These kids, shown a book, point to each dog and say "dog." They are not even saying "doggie run" much less things things about dog experience -- "dog scared" or "dog bored." And they are really really far from using words to express some general principle, by saying something like "doggie should wait." No doubt they understand more than they can express, but not THAT much more.
First off, yes, I think they can understand the concept. But even if not, I think it's never to early to start parenting properly! Otherwise, you get into habits that stay even after the children have grown.
Have you considered the possibility that you just had very easy children? I have two, and they are worlds apart in terms of challenge. They just are that way.
I definitely have easy children. But I also think waaaay too many people hide behind the excuse of 'my child is difficult, they're just born this way'. Same way parents stick an iPad on their kids' laps as soon as they board a plane.
Having followed that advice, do you just ignore the now-screaming child, or attempt to keep talking to it in the hope of calming it down? When the child tries to get what it wants anyway, do you physically restrain it, or do you take the thing it wants away, do you shout at the child, or do you do something else?
Scott's kids are within a few days of mine, because I remember reading his announcement post while sitting in the mat ward. And while I know my child at this age can definitely understand and obey simple sentences like "go and give this to mummy", the finer distinctions of "is"-vs-"ought" inherent in "you shouldn't want something" aren't going to land anywhere yet.
Hah I can't quite remember how I handled the worst tantrums - must have blocked it from my memory. I won't lie, I wasn't the best at dealing with proper tantrums, but these were rare, in general my kids wouldn't scream just because they wanted something.
One thing that worked really well for us as parents were to trade places - e.g. if a child threw a tantrum in response to my intervention, my wife was better at calming them down, and vice versa.
But definitely, we wouldn't give in to screaming, and we would take things away if they were triggers for bad behaviour.
Another option is to set up the play space with some toys that are fun to play with together. My 1.5 year olds loved sitting in a circle with a small group and rolling one or more balls to each other.
Also games that everyone can play at once, like digging in a sand box or playing with a pile of duplos work pretty well. This scheme works best if the play space has fewer toys in it that are “extra special”.
Activities like joining forces to catch a parent, or attempt to wrestle a parent to the ground are great for building their team spirit and strategic thinking.
As they get get interested in developing particular skills, like stacking, you can turn this into a cooperative game in which the group is trying to stack a particular tall tower of pillows, and you might need help stabilizing it from different sides.
Oh, and before anyone asks “what happens if one child starts, knocking the tower over before it’s been built to everyone satisfaction?”
One way of dealing with this is to embrace how much fun it is to knock over towers and make it a group activity to build the tower as tall as possible and then when it’s your turn, you’re the one who gets to knock the tower over.
· people of great mind and achievement thereby become famous and get a lot of internet attention, and they also discuss complex, sensitive, and explosive topics, and allow themselves to be vulnerable;
· they consequently become targets of sneer, mockery, and bullying,
· and then their personality sort of changes when they start to associate the sort of outgroup who disagrees with them with sneering bullies;
· and then we lose these people of achievement because they devote their life to fighting some form of outgroup according to their new threat model.
Maybe we as humanity deserve to lose them for not having much stronger norms against mocking genuine openness and vulnerability, but it kinda sucks.
Maybe said out group needs to be destroyed? Maybe such people of great mind and achievement have come to the important realisation that any group that tolerates and encourages mockery of the honest and vulnerable is not a group that should be part of a healthy society?
I am reminded a bit of Richard Dawkins, who started out writing great books like The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype and wound up writing terrible books called things like No Really The Earth Isn't Flat You Fucking Idiots because he engaged with his dumbest critics rather than ignoring them.
Just recently I learned about a philosopher publicly criticizing another philosopher for publicly praising Dawkins's Selfish Gene, back at that time. And Dawkins engaged.
What for?
This criticizing philosopher had really crazy views, and would never ever be moved by an article exchange when she didn't even understand his book.
Yeah, Dawkins had two whole lives of being controversial. The second was when he devoted himself to arguing with creationists, the first was when he got attacked by leftists who fundamentally misunderstood what "The Selfish Gene" was about, perhaps confusing it with Ayn Rand's "The Virtue Of Selfishness".
I think that's a valid worry. Even without algorithms nudging us towards furious indignant exchanges, dialog between relative strangers online devolves very easily into a deep, furious feeling of being misunderstood, and a craving to counterattack.. We didn't evolve to discuss sensitive matters under these conditions, you know? For public intellectuals I think it's safer to write books and articles and do a podcast, as someone like Ezra Klein seems to mostly do, rather than engage directly via online forums.
part of life is knowing when not to be vulnerable, or cultivating the correct social distance between groups of people. if you fail at this, its you; there will always be enemies/outgroup when you make a statement, and you cannot bare your fuzzy tummy to anyone who walks by.
i don't know if the rise of autism makes this harder, or kids are raised by screens and generally managed too tightly to pick this up, but if you want to play football you will get tackled and lose games. You need to learn to process the negative parts and go beyond psychic pain or structure to minimize it.
I mean, yeah, on the one hand it's their failure to protect their epistemology. But on the other hand I think there are circumstances where doing the vulnerable thing is like being pro-social at your own expense, and when you have a large audience, this effect is stronger: you bring greater benefit at a greater expense. "This sucky situation you're not supposed to talk about happens, and people actually speak up about it now, including this famous and successful person. I thought I was the only one! Maybe I'll even discuss it with others when I see ten other people do so". It makes it less scary when you need to talk about something that wants you to be a silent victim; it becomes slightly harder to play the "nobody cares that you have this problem" routine. And in addition, I really do think that derision should be perceived as an unhealthier think than it currently is; it breaks communication and openness, and we badly need them. Rather: we badly need specifically the kind of communication that derision breaks.
I'm not familiar with who it is, but he might be doing it more to be understood or liked. If he is speaking truth to change the culture, he has to harden up and realize prophets get stones thrown at them.
Its not read as much these days, but Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War was formative for me because it showed both sides and didnt sugarcoat it. it turns out something as simple as refusing to sell chocolates for a fundraiser can cause outright hatred and violence as the price for disturbing the universe.
whoever he is has to keep it in mind. you cant make people be nicer.
Do you have Scott Aaronson in mind? Because in his case, the cause and effect are reversed, i.e. the ultimate source of his descent into genocidal madness is a deep-rooted persecution complex, not internet bullies or SneerClub (in fact, bullies just became a convenient excuse for him).
Initially I thought he meant Jordan Peterson, he started out as a basic righty telling young men to clean their rooms and got more and more unhinged.
Eh, in my opinion he's no worse than the Free Press, and not nearly as influential. But I'm kind of wishy-washy on the whole Israel thing, honestly. It makes people very angry to bring up, it doesn't divide cleanly into left and right so you can always start fights with it (a perfect scissor statement!), I don't have any special expertise to bear on the situation, and being half Jewish and having frankly right-wing and sadistic natural leanings I don't think my natural inclinations are going to add anything useful.
My opinion of people like Jordan Peterson is that they are frauds, preying on ignorance. "clean your room" is bog-standard Behavioural Activation Therapy, yet he presented it as some genius idea he invented. This generated him a credibility that led to that crowd believing him anything.
Did he say that? I'm actually not that familiar with the guy, but I see his name more than Aaronson's. (Maybe Aaronson's name is very well known in computing--lot of techies here!)
The cognitive-behavioral people redid Stoicism for the 20th century, but I guess they gave credit.
Yeah that’s a great question. Partly it’s because the USA is a big deal and Israel low key wields a lot of political power there. Mossad and CIA are heavily intertwined. So I think people have the intuition, which is largely correct, that USA/Israel military and intelligence agencies have been responsible for a lot of bad things in the world over the past decades (in Middle East and elsewhere) and have been getting away with it due to their superior military and cultural influence. For example Syrian civil war had many more casualties than Gaza, and it was sponsored by the USA who were literally funding and arming Al Qaeda to try and topple Assad.
Unfortunately some of these people project their frustrations onto the Palestinians, who mostly just want to live in peace like any other group of people, and end up supporting Hamas (yay! Resistance!) who are the worst type of blood-and-soil nationalists and have done more harm to the Palestinian aspiration for a free state than Netanyahu could ever dream of. Their ideology is basically Nazism - global caliphate, superior race, armed struggle, Lebensraum for the Islamic people, kill the Jews.
Ahmed Fouad Alkhaitib is the clearest thinker and speaker on this conflict I’ve found - check him out on Twitter/X. He is a Palestinian peace activist. Hopefully he will be President of a free Palestinian state some day.
I don't know if I can ask anyone to do anything, I'm not the moderator, just the author of the comment, but I think it's best if we don't discuss any specific people here. It's culture-warish (so has a chance to derail discussion) and sorta off-topic (at least, I'd like to discuss the general phenomenon, not the stance of particular people). Also, I'd love to try to approach people with humanity, not discarding anyone, discarding seems like the opposite of what I'm trying to do: to understand, restore the severed communication, to bridge the gap... At any rate, I think it's best to go without personalities now.
Fair enough, Vadim. I posted this example because I feel the description of the process you give in the parent comment is too abstract and simplistic, in fact simplistic enough to be misleading. Behind virtually every case of "someone kind who was radicalized by exposure to internet bullies" is a more complex story (that often paints the person in worse light). The case of SA is one such example - at first glance he fits your general description and thus would invite sympathy, yet in fact the opposite is true (but you need to dig a bit deeper).
I initially assumed that V was referring to SG's recent criticism of SA's politeness policy and labeling that criticism as bullying. But that's fairly weak tea, and I dismissed it.
It has indeed been inspired by said person, who has, in my perception, always been an epitome of kindness and humanity. But I thought it best not to name them: firstly, out of respect and not to turn this comment section into an off-topic discussion of them, and secondly, I have other examples in mind, as well.
Can you explain why do you think a genocide apologist should command respect? Hard to swallow pill: the same person can be an epitome of kindness and humanity in one context and, when triggered, advocate wholesale slaughter in another.
OK. Now I'm really curious. Who's the genocidal apologist? And which genocide are they whitewashing? There have been so many genocides in the 20th Century (and a few in the 21st century) that I could think of dozens of people who'd fit this bill.
Okay, *one* good reason was to last more than several hours without turning this into a discussion of the specific culture war which the discussion of *any* specific example of the phenomenon in post may bring.
If you're too fearful of controversy, then why make this argument in the first place? And why should we be believe you if you can't support your claim with examples? If you think of yourself as a rationalist, you should be able to support your argument with examples. And Truth with a capital T should win out over petty prejudices.
I read it regularly as a reminder not to be too enamored of rationalism (or any other ideology).
I still think I'd rather have the ACX commentariat beside my side, at work, as friends, or God forbid in a foxhole. You guys might get shot first, but Sneer Club seems like the sort to push you into oncoming fire.
> I read it regularly as a reminder not to be too enamored of rationalism (or any other ideology)
A better version of Sneerclub might be worth reading for that very reason, but the actual Sneerclub that exists is a phenomenon entirely of one ideology; specifically it's a bunch of leftists who hate Rationalism because it's not leftism.
By the way, is there really much rationalism left in the commentariat? It's not like we discuss or apply techniques from the sequences, Bayesianism or whatever, isn't the commentariat at this point just a self-selected group of nice (and not-so-nice) like-minded people talking about diverse (and not-so-diverse) things?
At least no one is pulling https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ - that I always found super annoying, and Bayesianism kills that, because the so-called logical fallacies are for Bayesians simply weak evidences.
I've been to a meetup where Scott also was, in Paris. He walked past me, I said hi (even though I don't know him), and he gave me this look like "who the hell is this???", awkwardly waved his hand, and resumed his way :)
The values of the meetup seemed that the people assembled were sufficiently diverse and tolerant of strange ideas as to bring interesting shit into each other's lives. Still, the actual rationalism seems like a nice thing to have had. And, like, Scott's contributions in the form of introducing useful concept handles like "motte and bailey" have also been very nice! Other than that, for a no-labels teetotaler, assembling by political views to drink feels purposeless somehow...
Are you worried about this happening to you, or do you think you're too in touch with reality / had too much exposure to nasty people saying nasty things about you on the internet to be in the high-risk group?
Do you have any ideas about preventing this from happening to you, personally? Other than making the world a gentler place, that is?
(As for me: I hope to not become famous, and I don't consume twitter for the same reasons I don't consume heroine, which I hope protects me somewhat. Otherwise, here's what's been helpful for me personally when I'm bitter and desperate: creating the things that I want to create; and focusing on things of beauty, as well as telling others about them. Maybe I should ask someone that in case I ever become a radicalized crackpot, they should send me one poem a day.)
The anniversary of the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan has given rise to a lot of debate. I did a podcast with Gary Bass on one of the things that happened next, namely the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. Gary is the writer of Judgement at Tokyo which I can’t recommend enough.
As you all know by now the podcast is called Subject to Change (with Russell Hogg) and you should all subscribe. It’s free and advertisement free!
As with the better known Nuremberg trials the tribunal sought to prosecute as a war crime not just the usual atrocities but also the waging of a war of aggression. This was a brand new idea and caused all sorts of problems and led to the massive 1,000+ page dissenting judgement from Judge Radhabinod Pal. His view was that fighting wars had never been a crime and that the Allies were just making it up. (He didn’t deny that the committing of atrocities could be war crimes).
Anyway here are a few things I learned on the podcast:
- Unlike Germany where the government policy was basically whatever Hitler said, Japan had a genuine cabinet government albeit heavily dominated by the military.
- The decision was made to prosecute all members of the cabinet in place at the time of Pearl Harbor as class A war criminals.
- This was particularly unfair on Shigenori Tōgō who had argued in favour of accepting American demands and against the attack on Pearl Harbor.
- This wasn’t polite demurral on his part. He pretty much had toe to toe shouting matches with the military. And this at a time when resisting the military regularly led to your assassination.
- Anyway much good it did him. Partly because the Japanese had destroyed all the records that the American bombings hadn’t already incinerated he was convicted and died in prison.
- More fortunate was Nobosuke Kishi. He was also part of the Pearl Harbor cabinet. But the trials were split in two and he was scheduled for part 2. Part 1 took so long they gave up on part 2 and let them go.
- Nobosuke Kishi ends up as prime minister as does his more famous grandson Abe Shinzo. Abe was a nationalist and very much regarded the Tokyo tribunal as victors justice and tried and failed to get Japan’s constitution changed to allow it to have armed forces (and not just heavily armed self defence forces!)
- One of the atrocities the Japanese were accused of was the incident at the island of Chichijima. Eight airmen were shot down, captured, executed and then partially eaten. A ninth was floating towards Chichijima in his life raft but was picked up by an American submarine.
- At the time he wasn’t anyone special but his name was George Herbert Walker Bush, later to become president of the United States.
- Many years later Bush attended Emperor Hirohito’s funeral and tactfully said something to the effect of how tremendously moved he was by all the pageantry.
- Judge Pal’s dissenting judgement was and still is much appreciated among the nationalists in Japan. Part of his argument was based on the racism that the Japanese had faced in trying to become part of the community of first rank nations. That made the quote he used to close his judgement slightly unfortunate. Well, not the quote itself but the person who said it - the white supremacist from the Civil War, Jefferson Davis:
When Time shall have softened passion and prejudice,
when Reason shall have stripped the mask from misrepresentation,
then Justice, holding evenly her scales, will require
much of past censure and praise to change places.
Anyway that’s just a few bits. Here is the real thing. And Gary Bass’s book is terrific!
>His view was that fighting wars had never been a crime and that the Allies were just making it up
Note that one chapter of Profiles in Courage is dedicated to Robert Taft's advocacy of that position, which, the book argues, cost him the 1948 Republican presidential nomination.
It is my understanding that the idea of war crimes and the tribunals came from Stalin, and was a tool he was planning to use to eliminate "the officer class" altogether. Evidently, Truman was less keen on the idea than FDR, and so the trials were significantly narrowed, and the use of the death penalty was significantly reduced. This was the first time in history that the idea of "war crimes" was introduced. Before that, defeated enemies were eliminated just because they were defeated enemies, and no legal fig leaf was required.
Well I don’t disagree at all that the military dominated the government nor that everyone (even the emperor) was at risk of assassination if he stood up to them. (Note the attempted coup and assassinations immediately after the decision to surrender!)
But it was genuine constitutional government in a way Hitler’s wasn’t. And there was real debate not least at the time of the decision to attack Pearl Harbor and at the time of deciding whether to surrender and on what terms. And Shigenori Tōgō did stand up to the military in cabinet and at great personal risk.
And Togo failed, because the Japanese military did whatever they wanted and didn't listen to civilians or the Emperor or anyone else. (Despite constantly proclaiming their loyalty to the Emperor.) The army and navy even worked against each other because no one had control of both. The army did whatever they thought was best for the army and the navy did whatever they thought was best for the navy.
I admit it was still on sketchy legal grounds - jumping from the concept of a state breaking a treaty i.e. international law to individual criminal liability. Basically the people who started to those wars could not possibly know they could be prosecuted for it. This is in my book illegal, and was a classic case of might makes right. Given that the entire purpose of laws is to prevent violence, they generally break down near truly large-scale violence, such as world wars.
>Japan had a genuine cabinet government
Um look up all the assassinations of the era. Every politician who did not do what the hyper-nationalistic secret societies of officers wanted, got assassinated by them. This was not a genuine government in my book.
An idea for sf world building: sending probes from a simulation to the host world. This would be like a submarine (or a space ship) - everything you sense would be through devices but you could experience the host world.
This could lead to complex plays like sending submarines across two simulation boundaries. From two parallel simulations of from a double simulation to the real host.
Further it could lead to ideas about infinite simulation stacks. Or about what is even a simulation. If you can have peripheral device controlled from the simulation- then you can use it to manipulate the simulation substrate. Then what is really the boundary between the simulation and the host?
I have also a not well formed intuition about our senses and muscles being such peripherals of our brains. Does that make our world the host world?
I have been playing with the idea of hacking the source code of the simulation from inside. I was going to do a short story, but it is metastasizing into a novel. I guess it will have to wait until the novel I am working on now is complete...
You might be interested specifically in this: https://gregegan.net/MISC/CRYSTAL/Crystal.html - although in this case the initial probes are made available to the inhabitants of the simulation.
""Home Is the Hangman": A sentient space-exploration robot, lost years before, has apparently returned to Earth. One of its original designers has died under suspicious circumstances. Has the Hangman returned to kill its creators? The hero must find the Hangman and stop it, and time is running out. This story won the 1976 Hugo Award for Best Novella."
Yeah - I should have asked AI - apparently there are quite a few elaborations on this theme, although not everything fits - the first one it found is kind of different with parallel timelines you don't have all the complexity about host/simulation and controlling actuators.
----
Yep—there’s a rich vein of SF that hits your “sim-pilots + cross-layer probes + stack boundaries” idea. Here’s a tight, curated map with the closest matches first:
### Closest match (teleoperated bodies across layers)
* **William Gibson — *The Peripheral***: people in one timeline “drive” synthetic bodies called *peripherals* in another timeline via a quantum link; it’s basically cross-layer telepresence with gatekeepers and bandwidth politics. The TV adaptation spells it out: Flynne is “piloting a robot (Peripheral) via quantum tunneling” into a future London “stub.” ([Wikipedia][1])
### Nested sims & stack awareness
* **Daniel F. Galouye — *Simulacron-3*** (a.k.a. *Counterfeit World*): early, very on-point tale of a simulated city whose denizens (and their creators) confront the fact of layered realities; directly inspired *The Thirteenth Floor*. ([Wikipedia][2])
* **Greg Egan — *Permutation City***: uploaded minds build their own physics and effectively decouple from the “host,” pushing the idea that substrate control can move *up* the stack. ([Wikipedia][3])
* **Iain M. Banks — *Surface Detail***: societies wage a “War in Heaven” over simulated afterlives (Hells), with actors moving strategies between the real and virtual theaters. ([Wikipedia][4], [WIRED][5])
### Writing to (and hacking) the substrate
* **Greg Egan — “Luminous”** and **“Dark Integers”**: mathematicians discover parts of math/physics are *computationally contingent* and use proofs like exploits to alter reality—practically a manual for “peripherals that write to the substrate.” ([Wikipedia][6])
* **Black Mirror — “White Christmas”**: a copied consciousness (“cookie”) is enslaved to run a smart home—i.e., a sim mind operating host-layer sensors/actuators under harsh time dilation. ([Wikipedia][7])
* **Caprica**: a virtual avatar (Zoe-A) is instantiated into a robot chassis; the show treats the jump from sim to host as an engineering and political problem. ([WIRED][8], [Wikipedia][9])
### Telepresence/peripheral craft (great for your “sim-submarine” feel, even when not full sims)
* **John Scalzi — *Lock In***: “threeps” (teleoperated bodies) with all the social/legal infrastructure around who gets to drive what, and how. Useful for your protocol/port-authority worldbuilding. ([Wikipedia][10])
* **Martha Wells — *Murderbot Diaries***: relentless, practical telepresence (bots, cameras, drones) with bandwidth/latency/security constraints that feel exactly like piloting a hull across a noisy boundary. ([Wikipedia][11])
### Boundary-blur aesthetics (the vibe of layers collapsing)
* **Serial Experiments Lain**: reality and the network interpenetrate; less about robots, more about what counts as the “host of the moment.” Great mood/reference text for your metaphysics. ([Wikipedia][12])
If you want, I can spin this into a mini-syllabus with the **specific chapters/episodes** that best illustrate: (1) bandwidth/latency limits, (2) actuation budgets and vetoes, and (3) stack-aware politics (ports, tariffs, “cut rights”).
Neal Stephenson's Fall, or Dodge in Hell plays in this space a bunch, especially with a late implication that (spoiler warning) the recurring character across several Stephenson books from widely different time periods Enoch Root is in some way a visitor from a higher layer of reality.
There are some Substacks about how progressive parents should not let boys play with toy guns, and it bugs me, because I am pretty sure Che Guevara or the Black Panthers did. That is, if progressives are a political tribe, they need to have some warriors to protect them. What is the endgame of this version of progressivism, to become a holy-victim martyr?
Perhaps this is the problem with morality-based movements, they can take morality too far and thus give up self-defense or give up basically anything that might step on anyone's toes, and thus adopt, to quote Ozy, the life goals of dead people.
Ah, this is an old thing, it didn't start with progressive parents. I remember even back in the late 70s that there were campaigns (maybe that's too organised a word to use here) about not letting boys play with guns, but this was more inspired by feminism (you know, the bad old patriarchy, gendered toys - though that handy phrase wasn't in common usage then -, violence against women, violence in general, raising boys to wage war, etc.)
Have you considered investing in a soundproof playroom?
Watch KPop Demon Hunters. Strongest possible recommendation. (It's on Netflix).
I don't go gushing about every piece of media I love on here, but this one in particular I think needs to get direct recommendations in front of people's eyeballs, since it is very natural to pass on if you don't have someone screaming at you about it. It was on my Netflix's "most watched/liked" suggestions panel for like 2 months straight and I kept passing it over, like, "haha ok very cute I'm sure, a basic action movie with K-Pop songs for K-Pop tweens". And, yes, actually that's basically what it is, but the quality is so far beyond what you would expect from something like that... that it makes it work for ~everyone. I think the humor, action, aesthetics, and emotions are all basically perfect. Just... joy, especially the beginning and ending. The music goes without saying.
You don't have to be a huge K-Pop fan to enjoy it - I'm not. Give it a try! You will know within about 5 minutes if it's for you.
And to make it a little more relevant here: (major spoilers for both UNSONG and this) V gubhtug vg jnf vagrerfgvat/vashevngvat gung Wvah vf onfvpnyyl gur nagv-Pbzrg Xvat. Nyy ur unq gb qb jnf tb nybat jvgu uvf gevivnyyl rnfl cneg va Ehzv'f cyna, juvpu pyrneyl jbhyq unir jbexrq, naq ur jbhyq unir fnirq gur jbeyq naq uvzfrys. Ng gur pbfg bs yvivat jvgu n zbqrengryl thvygl pbafpvrapr. Naq ur gheaf vg qbja! PX ba gur bgure unaq vf jvyyvat gb yvir jvgu qbvat nyy gung Bgure Xvat fghss.
Oh man. Multiple people whose opinions I respect thought it was great, including a couple of friends (though one's recommendation was extremely hesitant).
But for whatever reason, this review and available timing finally nudged me into pushing "play."
And
OH
MY
GOD.
I loathed it so, SO MUCH.
I only got ten minutes in and literally couldn't bear it another moment. And, like, I don't know what else I was expecting - modern pop music in general and K-pop in particular always sends me into an ungovernable, make-it-STAHP! low-grade rage.
As do sassy, goofy, confident kids' movie protagonists, however well-designed and animated they may be.
...hmm.
It's possible I might be at least partly demon.
Come sit beside me on the "grumpy old folks don't vibe with the kids" bench 😁
Talking of modern cartoons/anime, the wildly (and to me incomprehensibly) popular "Hazbin Hotel" (quite apart from the philosophy behind it, so to speak - Lucifer et al. are all *good* guys, you guys, they're just misunderstood and need a second chance!), the art style drives me crazy. It's extremely stylised and I get that, but I think it's ugly (plus every character looks the same).
Ditto "The Amazing Digital Circus" - five minutes into the pilot (the only episode I watched), I *hated* Pomni. I continue to loathe, despise, and hate her, and want her to die horribly. But if I can't have that, I want her to suffer. She's just terrible. (The plot there is more interesting; this is what it's like to be a self-aware character in a video game when you are stuck between remembering your 'outside' self and becoming the in-game character. The show describes what it's like to be the character from inside the game experiencing it directly, rather than as the player outside).
The success of K-Pop in the West is interesting, it suggests there's a big hunger for something that our own culture is no longer willing to feed us.
When was the last time there was a successful western boy band or girl band? The Spice Girls? The Backstreet Boys? That was twenty years ago.
One direction is more recent, and my assumption would be that if I was 10 years younger I'd probably be able to think of a more recent one than that
One Direction were entirely manufactured from the X factor. I think Melvin is generally correct in thinking that boy bands have died off recently, but genres are imploding anyway. There’s no genres left except girls singing, hip hop and the occasional girls singing with hip hop in a crossover.
I don't see the objection K Pop bands are manufactured too.
If you're interested in economic history and haven't read any of Anton Howes' substack essays, you're missing out. His latest essay is about how contrary to common opinion, the sweeping restrictions on workers after the Black Death didn't go away once the Great Peasants Revolt of 1381 happened - they actually kept on tightening them for the next century or so, and Parliament basically never met a restrictive law on labor that it didn't like. And while it wasn't perfectly enforced, it -was- enforced. Possibly so enforced that it actually depressed English economic and population growth after the Black Death for a long time.
It really puts the British Parliament of the period in a much darker light. They almost come across like Poland's infamous Sejm, actively undermining the vitality of their own kingdom for their narrow short-term interests and privilege.
https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-the-century-long
He also has a good one making the argument that we get the causality of "England ran out of wood, switched to coal" backwards - the British were actually really good at conserving woodlands and utilizing them for the long-run when needed. Woodlands didn't really start to disappear en masse until they switched to coal and no longer needed them anymore.
https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-the-coal-conquest
You mean after King Richard II declared, "Serfs you were, and serfs you are still; you will remain in bondage, not as you were, but incomparably harsher. For as long as we live we will strive to suppress you, and your misery will be an example in the eyes of posterity," he DIDN'T loosen labor restrictions?
This is one of those things I knew but I thought most people interested in the period (admittedly a minority) knew. But no, apparently there's a bunch of people who thought the Statute of Labourers was just... kind of fake, I guess? Strange.
Increasingly I think a lot of academia builds giant superstructures on thin or absent evidence. Then they talk with each other a lot and create entire discourses that are decades of work based on almost nothing. A few months ago I had this discussion about Polanyi. Yes, yes, it's very important to some socialist theories. But that doesn't change his primary evidence is... basically just cherry picked to work backward from his conclusion. That he is now "too big to fail" is just an indictment of the academy's unwillingness to break with bad standards.
The phrase "maximum wage" is something I would expect in a caption on the greyscale gigachad guy as a joke, not an actual law. This is basically reverse communism, right? With far-reaching state control of the economy being the only part not reversed?
Also, "employers now had to provide their workers with only the best-quality [food]" (while keeping pay low) rhymes amusingly with big tech colluding to suppress wages, while having lavishly incredible free food. (Or, back in the day, at least; I hear it's reigned in now).
> This is basically reverse communism, right?
It's communism, but only for the capitalists. The best of both worlds!
Why don't you just buy 2 of every toy?
He says that's what they're doing now, except for when they get presents of one toy (and then they hide that toy until they can get a second one).
Fighting over toys is the traditional right of childhood. What is important is not the toy in itself, it's that the Other Child has it and I do not 😁 This is exactly why kids have to be taught to share and take turns and wait, etc. It don't come natural!
Speaking as a parent of slightly older kids - here's what happens:
One toy breaks. Or gets a small fleck of paint peel off that makes it incrementally different. Or god forbid one gets lost in the giant mounds of toys that have collected over the years, like Smaug's treasure horde. And then the cycle continues.
These kids are WAY too young now to register small differences like that. By the time they are old enough to notice that kind of difference they will be old enough not to need the 2-of-everything workaround. They will be old enough to understand things like “it’s her turn right now … how about drawing a picture while you wait … you could try offering her your horsie as a trade … if you try to take it from her I’m going to give you a time out … “ etc
Sorry, this was not my experience as an unreasonable child.
Oh, you mean that list of things I said they'll be able to understand? I didn't mean they would hear them and say "Oh ok!" and comply. I meant those were the kinds of things to be saying to 2 and 3 year olds in I-want-that-toy struggle situations as one begins working on civilizing them.
I mean even at Age 8 I insisted on an identical My Little Pony to my sister, and she'd need duplicates of my transformers. (Not even twins, 1 year age gap). And can you believe my grandparents got HER a Bumblebee and I got stuck with a Goldbug!
That is why the cry of the child is "It's not fair!" Children (I speak as having been one myself) are aware of, and viciously enforce, the tiniest infringement of what is seen as equal treatment. If I can get away with having ten sweets and Billy has none, I will do so. But if some interfering adult makes us share, then you better believe I want five and Billy gets five, and if there is one sweet that is dinged about so that it's smaller and the interfering adult proposes giving it to Billy, I *will* scream blue murder until it is cut in half and we each get one half. And it better be exact halves or else!
Black-and-white thinking (and, yes, a certain amount of viciousness) are what motivates the childish mind. Chesterton puts it down to love of justice, but I think it is more "unless the exact rule of the law is followed in the smallest point so nobody gets preferential treatment to myself, then PUNISHMENT!" attitude:
"Sometime ago I went with some children to see Maeterlinck's fine and delicate fairy play about the Blue Bird that brought everybody happiness. For some reason or other it did not being me happiness, and even the children were not quite happy. I will not go so far as to say that the Blue Bird was a Blue Devil, but it left us in something seriously like the blues. The children were partly dissatisfied with it because it did not end with a Day of Judgment; because it was never revealed to the hero and heroine that the dog had been faithful and the cat faithless. For children are innocent and love justice; while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy."
Is this not solvable by damaging/defacing/hiding the other one?
If you're willing to spend all your time tracking the status of toy pairs and keeping up with the progress of entropy, perhaps.
My brother has identical twins and this is a pretty solid solution
Why is the gap between rich and poor so small?
At any given moment of your life, you can be doing something smart and clever and productive that creates a lot of value for others, or you can be doing something stupid that ruins your own life and those of others. And yet the gap in outcomes between someone in the top one percent of doing productive clever things and someone who has only ever been a massive net negative for the planet is just a few orders of magnitude.
There are way more options than just those two.
Well by jings, if the difference in the totals in my and Elon's bank accounts is "just" a few orders of magnitude, I'd hate to see your notion of a really big difference.
>Why is the gap between rich and poor so small?
Because your units of measurement are arbitrary.
I think you underestimate various costs of doing things.
People spend a lot of time doing things that could be called "maintenance". Sleep and exercise are things that even the richest billionaires cannot outsource. For average people there are also things like cooking, doing the dishes; hundred little things related to household. If you already started rich, you can outsource a lot of those; but if you did not, you need to do these along the way to getting rich.
Another big cost is "training" and "research". You can get lucky and get born with high IQ and high conscientiousness. You still need to learn things, and that takes time. It takes time to develop skills. It takes time to study the market, so that you know what would be the smart and productive thing to do.
Notice that this happens in an adversarial environment. If you are rich, there are entire industries specialized on scamming people like you. Many people will actively try to mislead you during your research, to make you spend money on them. You need to be smart enough to resist them. Then there are thousands of temptations, more of them for the rich, you need solid work ethics to resist them. But suppose you got all of that.
Then, there is a cost of "doing things". Even if you know what is the smart thing to do, it takes some time to actually do it. If you already started rich, you could hire people to do it for you. But then you need to spend some time trying to hire competent people. Or you could hire a manager to do that for you, but then you need to spend some time trying to hire the manager. There is always a risk that the people you hired will be incompetent and will ruin your otherwise good idea.
Not all useful things are profitable. For example, there are many things in the general category of "helping the poor", where the problem with profitability is exactly the fact that the poor do not have a lot of money. There are all kinds of friction, such as bureaucratic or legal, which can shift the equation so that a potentially profitable endeavor becomes unprofitable. If your plan is to hire people to do some work for you, you have to generate enough profit to pay them, too. But if you want to do it alone, it will take a lot more of your time.
And again, doing things happens in an adversarial environment. When there is a problem you are trying to fix, chances are that someone else (potentially a rich and powerful person) profits from the things being as they are now. Even if you win, you will burn a lot of resources in a zero-sum fight.
Now of course all these problems can be overcome in some way, and some people actually manage that. But it puts a huge tax on "doing something smart and productive at any moment of your life".
Ha ha.
I mean, putting aside the part where there's no observable meaningful correlation between how positive your deeds are and the outcome you're getting for them...
...the thing is, the people amassing wealth wouldn't be able to do it without the cooperation from and work of everyone else. And this requires a common baseline of life quality for basically every person in society (possibly except a few legit meritless/harmful outcasts, but you really want to keep that group marginal, lest its ubiquity pulls the standards of the entire society down), so they can perform all the little tasks that are necessary to keep the society and its economy going. And Earth's resources keep being limited, so after fulfilling these basic needs there's just not enough surplus left for the wealthy to amass wealth ad infinitum.
You've got a significant conceptual fallacy going there.
The number of the 1% who are doing smart and useful things is way smaller - in percentages or in absolute numbers - than the number of people who are doing smart and useful things on the 99%.
There's very little observable correlation between 'useful' and 'remunerated' IMO. I'm not saying this in a cynical or fashionably left kind of way, I am merely reporting what I (and others) have personally observed.
There's no way that this is true. Provide some references or I call shenanigans.
My model for the median 1%er is that he inherited a bunch of properties for which he collects rents.
My model for the median 99%er is that he is working as a plumber.
I think that few of the highly educated, useful professionals will make it into the top 1%. Being a physician might land you in the top 10% of income, but is unlikely to actually make you a millionaire.
IIRC the distribution of wealth/income before taxes and transfers is roughly lognormal, so it's actually pretty close to what we'd expect (although it may be somewhat muted in that in some jobs low and high performers are paid similarly).
That said I think this is actually overestimating the difference between normal and highly competent people. This is something it's more common to underestimate, but having spent some time around top 0.1% founder-CEO types, while they're incredibly competent, they're not *legendary* in some unreachable way. The competence gap is real, but it's finite.
The richest person in the world has ~$100 billion and the poorest person has ~0. That's eleven orders of magnitude. That's about the same ratio as the width of a human hair to the diameter of the moon. In what universe is that considered small?
Melvin clearly has his own view of what constitutes "really big".
I think, though, or at least I'm getting an impression from the phrasing of the comment, that he is getting more at "why are the very good, great, elite human capital, productive, efficient, Really Useful Engine people hampered and hobbled by the great unwashed mass of lazy leeches siphoning off their achievements and benefits? Why can't I, as a Really Great Productive Economic Poohbah, make those wastrels into helots and serfs for my good, or else just wipe them out (humanely of course, I'm not a monster!) so that us Productive Beneficial Types will get all the goodies we have worked for and the resources wasted on the bottom 90% of humanity will accrue to us".
Melvin may not be even gesturing in this direction, but I tend to break out in hives when someone starts on about "the productive really smart having great ideas and working super-duper hard every minute creating value versus the grubby proles just sucking up all that value", because it never leads anywhere good.
The poorest person is in significant debt.
And I'm not saying this as in "so the gap is unmeasurably huge", I'm saying this as in "accumulated wealth is actually not a good measure here, day-to-day consumption of resources is a better one, and there, the gap is probably somewhat smaller".
Under capitalism, the only way to measure "creates a lot of value for others" is the literal dollar value created, as measured by the dollars you get paid to create that value. Therefore, by definition, both rich and poor are getting exactly as much value as they create for others.
If there's some other way you want to measure value to society, you either need to find a way for people to get paid for that value, or try something other than capitalism.
(For instance, you might try to get a position which isn't subject to the demands of the market and which allows you to get as rich as you care to be without caring about your effect on the rest of the planet. Such as "President.")
> Under capitalism, the only way to measure "creates a lot of value for others" is the literal dollar value created
By that definition, ransomware gangs create an amazing value. After all, the company paying the ransom is very much agreeing that the deal they offer is worth it, otherwise they would not be paying.
I disagree though that this is the only way you can measure value in capitalism. Look at EA. Their whole thing is to have a non-monetary outcome axis (utils, QALY gain, neuron-seconds of suffering prevented, whatever), and a monetary axis, and they try to find the most impactful interventions.
So far, EA has not been arrested by the capitalism police for caring about something other than hard cash, so I think your claim is false.
I don't think even the most hardcore libertarian would consider ransomware gangs to be capitalist, since they get their money from extortion.
But also, EA is about finding the most good *per dollar value!* You can only do good as an EA if you can convince people to donate money, and how much people decide to spend on charity reveals (in at least some sense) how much they value charity versus other goods.
>the only way to measure "creates a lot of value for others" is the literal dollar value created, as measured by the dollars you get paid to create that value. Therefore, by definition, both rich and poor are getting exactly as much value as they create for others.
Among other problems, this ignores externalities.
The way we normally handle externalities is "finding a way to get paid for that value" - either taxing the producers of negative externalities or subsidizing jobs with positive externalities. But capitalism on its own won't capture that value.
Yes, but how is that responsive to what I said, which was specifically re your claim that a person's salary = the amount of value he creates?
"the only way to measure "creates a lot of value for others" is the literal dollar value created, as measured by the dollars you get paid to create that value"
That is extremely depressing. Get paid lots of money to produce crappy scam ads? You are a value creator! Clean up the beaches for free as a volunteer? No value at all!
> Get paid lots of money to produce crappy scam ads? You are a value creator!
...extractor. You are a value /extractor/. It's not thermodynamics - value can be created and destroyed - but stored value can nevertheless move around without either of those things happening, and frequently does.
See also: UK privatised services' claims that they are creating value for their shareholders, and other forms of asset stripping (no, this does not make me any less depressed)
Hmm, perhaps unrestricted capitalism isn't an optimal system :P.
Not sure how much you are trolling here, but I’ll take the bait.
Rich vs poor is only one measure of outcome. Lots of rich people are miserable and lots of poor people are happy.
People who do productive things with their life that helps others, generally end up happier than criminals.
We worry about the gap in rich vs poor because most people have the intuition that a sufficiently advanced country should provide for everyone’s basic needs. Everyone should have food, health care, education. Every child should have a chance. I don’t mind if Jeff Bezos wants to buy three private jets as such - good for him, say I - but I do feel like we as a society should be prioritising poor children in a Detroit ghetto over that.
Yeah, ISTM that poor kids not getting enough to eat or not getting wn education or something seems pretty far removed from Bezos having a giant yacht, since we have a whole complex system of taxes and government programs intended to make rich people pay for food and schooling for poor people, and the government actually collects a ton of money for these purposes. They often don't spend that money very well, and that is a problem, but it's not a problem with Bezos.
That said, I also feel like the way to help said poor children is not “tax the rich!” The problems are that these kids grow up in crime ridden environments dominated by gang violence. Dramatically increase police presence and take gangs and drugs off the street if you really care about poor people, instead of virtue signalling BLM.
It's not just crime. Some parents are too fucked up to take care of their kids. Crime makes matters worse, but there are additional problems.
Yeah that’s true as well
"tax the rich" and "virtue signaling BLM" are two completely different positions. You will see people advocating for both but you will also see plenty of people who advocate for one and not the other. Also, if you want better drug enforcement and police presence, those are public policy initiatives that also have to be paid for, through taxes.
I think the answer is “because that’s something society has optimized for”. You could imagine a pseudo feudal modern society where Jeff Bezos is the Duke of the American northwest and anything that offends him is punishable by death. Presumably in that society decisions really would compound into outcomes like “baron of Seattle” and “dead at 22 for anti-Bezos graffiti”. It’s just that that outcome is repulsive to most people and our government is somewhat responsive to such preferences so that doesn’t happen.
I’d prefer to inherit my money. Less effort.
I say let's take the net negative folk, mix them with some cement and ground up landfill, compress them into bricks and use the bricks to build a handsome addition to your home, Melvin.
I feel like in your comment, being rich, clever and productive are all associated, as is being poor with being stupid and a massive negative for the planet.
I think those variables might be mostly independent. You could be simply born a rich fool. An oil executive might be clever, rich and productive and a massive net negative for the planet.
But if you feel like the gap between the rich and poor is small, then I guess the answer might be something like progressive taxation or some other tax policy?
It seems pretty huge to me.
There are more options than the ones you list.
Creating value for others and getting others to give you their money are separate, orthogonal skills.
Early in 2024, Jonathan Last at the Bulwark coined JVL's Law: Any person or institution not explicitly anti-Trump will become a tool for authoritarianism eventually.
I keep seeing examples of this pop up, so today I slapped together a web site to document it. Right now I only have a few entries but plan to backfill it as I find the time.
https://jvlslaw.com/
There is a steelman version of this position which I believe is backed up by some historical observation. Which is that as a general rule, people's political relationship to authoritarian regimes is divided into three categories, enablers, bystanders, and people who resist. This is setting aside the fourth category which is just straight-up victims, but that's not really a choice anyone makes.
The point is, the vast majority of people are bystanders at the start of an authoritarian regime, but as its excesses become greater, generally more people are filtered into taking up one of the two poles, either because their material comfort and safety is no longer guaranteed by merely being a bystander, or because their moral sense will no longer allow them to stand by while people are victims of the regime.
What, really, is a tool for authoritarianism? And is there in fact no gray zone? For instance let's say there's a DC urologist who treats several members of Trump's cabinet. And let's say the urologist catches some problem that could have killed one of those guys if the doc had not caught and treated it. So is the urologist a tool for authoritarianism? Hmmm?
The urologist is following the norms of a profession where he is supposed to do no harm. I think that one's pretty easy, a better example would be a doctor who is brought in to a camp to consult on how long everyone can do forced labor each day before they die. On the one hand, maybe his presence will actually spare the prisoners some suffering, on the other hand, he is actively abetting the moral crime of the camp's existence.
A softer example is how Trump's doctor in the first administration was clearly lying about basic stuff like height and weight. Now he's in Congress after an endorsement by Trump.
You are right, that is a more recent, less intense example.
Ironically, "those who aren't explicitly for me are against me" is a fairly authoritarian credo.
You have made me once again extremely satisfied to be childless.
Strange. I had the opposite response -- this made me regretful that I will probably not have children. There is something simultaneously very charming and very sad about the behavior of small children -- like you are watching Adam and Eve having their first quarrel outside the gate of the garden of Eden.
Beautiful thought, I will be repeating that phrasing for the rest of my life.
And simultaneously it's made ~me~ nostalgic for those sweet, intense, irreplaceable days of early childhood.
There isn't anything much more fascinating than watching young humans learning to learn.
At what point is it appropriate to infer someone's motives from the facts they communicate? A toy example: you come across "Fun Data Facts" social media account. It posts things like:
>Fact: Over 97% of the water on earth is salt water!
>Fact: Nearly 25% of Irish people are alcoholics!
>Fact: Some bacteria live miles below earth's surface!
>Fact: Irish immigration the US is up 77% in the last 20 years!
>Fact: Goldfish have been domesticated for over 1000 years!
>Fact: Irish Americans commit domestic abuse at 7x the national average rate!
...and so on. At what point do you infer that this account is in fact a front for anti-Irish sentiment? If this account's goldfish-related posts are being promoted by respectable sources, should you point out this account's anti-Irish tendencies? What if it were just one in ten, or one in twenty, or one in fifty posts?
Bayes to the rescue. You start with some tiny probability that a fun fact poster is going to have a pet peeve against the Irish and will go on about them, while the bulk of your probability mass is that the poster will only very rarely mention the Irish. The first anti-Irish fact brings the probability to a 10% level. By the third fact, you are at 95% or something.
What are you doing with that inference? What are you hoping to achieve by bringing up the Irish stuff in the Goldfish debate? How does your inference change knowing the fact-poster is Irish?
I'd stand up for the good name of my nation, if I wasn't listening to the news on the radio right now. (There's a couple of news stories that are in WTF? territory).
We are drinking less! still too much, but not as much as we used to do!
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg2ynpxx22o
"Figures show people in the Republic of Ireland are drinking less alcohol.
A report by the Drinks Industry Group of Ireland (DIGI) to calculate the 2023 average level of consumption found alcohol consumption in the country is down by almost one-third over the past two decades.
Since the peak of 2001, the average per adult alcohol consumption has declined by 31%, according to the report authored by economist and associate professor emeritus at Dublin City University Anthony Foley."
So how much do we drink?
https://alcoholireland.ie/facts-about-alcohol/how-much-do-we-drink/
"In 2024 alcohol consumption was 9.43 litres of pure alcohol per capita aged 15 years or older. This represents a fall of more than 14% since the passage of the Public Health (Alcohol) Act in 2018.
In 2024, Ireland consumed per drinker:
262 cans of beer + 11 bottles of spirits + 39 bottles of wine + 31 cans of cider "
>In 2024, Ireland consumed per drinker:
262 cans of beer + 11 bottles of spirits + 39 bottles of wine + 31 cans of cider "
It's nice to be above average for once.
It seems like it matters quite a bit whether the claimed facts are actually true.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/
https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
Things being true is necessary but not sufficient. The question of whether and why I should ponder this specific list of true things in particular from the sea of all true things is important.
Yeah, I'm assuming relevance to the conversation at hand. If you bring up the black/white differences in crime rate in a discussion about criminal justice policy or policing or something, it's probably relevant; if you bring it up in a discussion about how to cook a tasty meal or something, probably you're just trying to pick a fight.
1. Suppose all Irish-related posts are all factually true.
2. Suppose they are mostly true, with some figures that have dubious sources or are taken out of context.
3. Suppose many are blatantly false.
In each of these cases, where would your line be?
If you are providing true information relevant to the discussion at hand that makes Irishmen look bad, I think calling you an anti-Irish bigot is a standard dark arts technique for trying to divert attention from those annoying true statements you are making. I don't want that to work out for the accuser, becase dark arts poison discussions and work at least as well in the service of falsehoods as truth.
If you are lying or making stuff up, then whatever your motives (maybe anti-Irish, maybe just wanting to stir up some trouble or win the current point for some reason of your own), then I want people to call that out so I know to stop giving your statements any weight.
If you are careless with the facts, either by motivated reasoning or just not caring very much, I also want people to call that out so I and other readers know not to give much weight to your claims, since they're often wrong or half-right.
Your motives are enormously less important to me than how honest and careful you are.
> At what point is it appropriate to infer someone's motives from the facts they communicate?
Immediately. Right from the first salt water fact. There is no unbiased selection of facts, any choice of facts reflects a particular world view. And if all you ever talk about is geography then you are turning a blind eye to Irish perfidy (sorry Deiseach)
No worries, Melvin, I know the Murphia are a sinister force for evil in the world!
Seems like they're trying to confine it to "Irish people making it big in the London hospitality scene", but we're not fooled, we know their tendrils extend into many nations and all fields! (I just wish some of them would stay gone instead of coming back home and chortling about the provincials they left behind them in boring old Ireland while they went off to make it big in London or New York or Australia).
https://www.rte.ie/lifestyle/food/2025/0310/1501255-murphia-list-2025-celebrating-irish-hospitality-in-london/
I’m more struck by the parental behavior of adjudicating children’s toy sharing during parallel play. Shrieking, I think, might be the thing to target at that age. How I don’t know. Shrieking startles old people in restaurants.
*Can* they share, developmentally, that early?
Seems like twins would be uniquely positioned to figure out sharing on their own. Alternately, I guess I could see that being a twin makes it all so much harder, the constant simmering irritation of your toys being pulled from your grasp.
I don't think that clothing, and personal style in general, is given nearly enough serious attention as an art form or an outlet for artistic expression specifically.
Sure, there are fashion periodicals and some (mostly awful) studies done on its social implications or history, but personal adornment is mostly cast in a frivolous light these days, or as something that is somehow less worthy of contemplation from a philosophical perspective. Fashion designers don't (and shouldn't) count as art experts, and the clothing industry doesn't really have direct parallels in sculpture, painting, or music. In general, we don't think of people with excellent dress in public as artists in the same way we would someone whose canvasses end up on display in a gallery. Even many artists tend to tone down their clothing choices deliberately.
It just seems like dismissing an entire field of biology as 'real science' because it sounds 'icky' to researchers.
>In general, we don't think of people with excellent dress in public as artists
But we should: https://www.nytimes.com/column/on-the-street
Boys are wearing makeup; looking “natural” for girls as was the 70s and early 80s fashion of (some of) our youths, is completely out, people pay for all manner of alterations permanent or not, the latter often time consuming; everyone wants the same pouty lips and nose, derrières are tightly wrapped for display - seems like personal adornment has never been more central at least since the court of Louis XVI!!
It's far from current, but _Dress for Success_ was a result of study of what clothes worked to look good in business.
As an aside, the history of clothing and textiles is fascinating. Prior to the 19thC, nearly all clothes were tailored to the wearer. The Napoleonic Wars and US Civil War led to huge demand for standard sized uniforms, and the ready-to-wear industry took off. By 1890, 60% of clothes sold in the US were ready-to-wear.
I splurged on a custom suit as a promotion gift to myself years ago. Having something specifically made for my body, after a lifetime of off the shelf Kohl's clothes, is real nice.
Ready-to-wear clothes also got a huge boost from industrialization. For most of human history, making cloth was insanely labor-intensive and was generally done at home, mostly with hand tools.
Textile production had been gradually getting centralized and commercialized starting some time earlier, as improved tools (spinning wheels replacing drop spindles, horizontal flying shuttle looms replacing vertical weaving, etc) made it practical for a single worker to supply much more than one family's worth of cloth. This vastly accelerated in the 19th century, and the mid-to-late 1800s was when the move to mass production expanded to encompass finished garments as well as yarn and cloth.
Yes, and certain fashions were, in fact, based upon very old artistic talents and crafts. Lace-making, for example, was quite painstaking before automation, and to have a whole garment of lace was not just costly, but also displayed the artistry inherent to the design.
A lot of other embroidery work or traditional sewing techniques used to be quite common in textile work, but all that changed once production shifted from cottage industry to factories.
I think of choosing aspects of one's appearance as folk art, but I haven't studied it.
I remember seeing an art museum exhibit on high fashion clothing of Yves Saint Laurent some years ago and the search engine shows some contemporary exhibitions on fashion clothing now.
https://seattleartmuseum.org/whats-on/exhibitions/yves-saint-laurent
I've been chatting with a friend from Switzerland. The thing that made me the most envious was them saying "our daughter is walking 30 min to and from her ballet school on her own since she was 10."
While I know what you are getting at, for a 30 minute walk kids might want to take their bike or public transport.
A few years ago I visited Berlin, where my grandfather was born (and left in 1930, when he was about eight). I remembered him telling me how he'd walk to school as a child, and I had the addresses of both his childhood home and the school, so I took the walk. It's like a 30 minute walk - hard to imagine a 7-8 year old child doing it now (even in Germany), but apparently it was normal in 1929 (which wasn't the best time in Germany).
I am European with a US-American wife. She grew up in Los Angeles. My mother-in-law recently told me I should enjoy the time with my children when they are very young, because it will get more exhausting. I asked her what age she found the hardest, and it was "between 6 and 15" because in her experience, that's when you spend your "free" time driving your children to various activities ("I was a part of 3 different carpool groups.").
This one always stuck with me as the starkest example of how lives can be completely different depending on things like infrastructure/city planning. Starting at around 9 or 10, I would get to most places by bike, and my parents had time to do other things than driving me and my siblings around. For them, having children between 6 and 15 was a completely different experience.
It always strikes me as rather sad to hear that kids need to be constantly driven to do "activities". When I was that age, I was perfectly capable of finding things to entertain myself, either alone or with my friends. We didn't need (or want!) an adult to tell us how we should spend our time.
I think that, yes, part of the issue might be that kids, especially in the US, are "overprogrammed".
But in some LA suburbs, kids often can't even realistically walk/bike to their friends' houses. That's certainly true for where my wife grew up. If you have three kids, and each of them wants to practice one activity on different times a week, and wants to hang out with friends on other days, that's a lot of driving without cramming your kids calendar at all (up to four days of "meeting friends", one day of "soccer practice" or "drum lessons").
I don't think my wife had a busier schedule than I did in middle school. It was just much harder to do stuff without being driven somewhere.
This touches on a culture war topic, but my question is not culture war related:
Lisa Cook has been accused of mortgage fraud recently, but I have not been able to get a good explanation for what is happening here. I'm interested in this from a mortgage law standpoint.
Can I get a neutral, non-politicized explanation of exactly what the what is the fraud that allegedly occurred in this case? I'm looking for both an explanation of what specifically the fraudulent action is, and also an explanation of why the action is fraudulent, in terms of who is being ripped off, and how.
Seems to me it would be possible for somebody to have 2 primary residences -- 2 homes, of same size, and each occupied approximately 50% of the year. I have no idea whether that is the case with Lisa Cook's homes, just thought I'd point that out.
> it would be possible for somebody to have 2 primary residences
Not according to the relevant legal definition, which is what matters here.
While applying for mortgages, she allegedly checked the box that multiple distinct residences were each her primary residence. Within days of each other.
The alleged victim is the federal government (funded by taxpayers), because there are programs to subsidize loans for primary residences.
>The alleged victim is the federal government (funded by taxpayers), because there are programs to subsidize loans for primary residences.
The alleged fraud would also be on MBS investors, since all else being equal, loans for a primary residence tend to have a lower interest rate than loans for secondary residences or investment properties, and not just because of subsidies. The risk premium for mortgages on primary residences is lower, all else being equal, because people tend to be more motivated to avoid their homes being foreclosed upon than other property.
I wonder if there might not be fraud alleged in the form of undisclosed debts, if the mortgages closed within days of one another. For the second mortgage application to be correct and complete, she would have had to disclose the debt for the first mortgage.
> The alleged victim is the federal government (funded by taxpayers), because there are programs to subsidize loans for primary residences
And presumably the banks offering the mortgages, who wound up offering lower rates than they would for a (riskier) non-PPOR.
What makes it riskier? Rates for primary residential mortgages are low because they're federally subsidized, right? If she defaulted on the mortgage, would whoever was holding the bag be able to able to try to force it onto someone else by arguing that it was/wasn't her primary residence and therefore the mortage was/wasn't eligible for whatever program?
I'm not sure whether they're federally subsidised or not in the US.
I know that home loans generally have a lower interest rate than investment property loans in Australia where there's no such subsidy, which I assume is a manifestation of investment properties being slightly riskier.
I'm guessing the mechanism is that people hitting hard financial times will still tend to do whatever it takes to not get kicked out of their own home, whereas they're more likely to default on their holiday house or investment property.
The government through its “quasi” entities acts as a purchaser of mortgages for primary homes. It may now be in the business of other types of properties. But that’s not what that apparatus was set up for.
That there are even homes to buy is owing to massive subsidies since WW2.
It’s the opposite of a free market.
>The alleged victim is the federal government (funded by taxpayers), because there are programs to subsidize loans for primary residences.
Can you provide a citation for this? I think there's a program to subsidize purchases by first-time homebuyers, but I can't find anything about a program to subsidize primary residences.
The term of art is "occupancy fraud", which is a fairly common way (and illegal) to get more favorable mortgage terms on, say, your vacation house in Maine. Primary residences get lower interest rates and various other benefits.
I'm not disputing that the interest rate differs. I'm asking, "Does the federal government subsidize loans specifically for primary residences?" In other words, I'm asking about the mechanism behind why the rate differs.
The government sponsored agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy the conforming mortgages and package them into mortgage back securities with some loan guarantees . The conforming part is that borrower has a certain credit score and income appropriate for the property and primary residences.
So the agencies guarantees are a form of subsidy. Even with the government involvement I would expect an interest rate differential because lenders would expect homeowners to put more effort on not going on default on the primary residence as oppose to their vacation home.
Politicians do it so routinely that the penalty must not be anything they fear.
If one purchases a second house, there are two possible rates available. One is the rate for primary homes, and one is the rate for secondary homes (eg, a vacation home). The mortgage rates for secondary homes are typically ~ 2% higher than for primary homes. How can you get that lower rate? Just say on the form you are buying a new primary home, and plan (say) to rent out the old one. There is a strong incentive to make that claim, either because you really do want to rent out your old home or maybe you think no one will notice. It seems Lisa Cook made that claim for a second home mortgage, while leaving evidence that she still lived in the original home (maybe voter registration or such). So it may have been a fraudulent claim, or maybe she really did intend to move and didn't.
I don’t know what she is accused of, but if you need an example from across the political divide, there is Ken Paxton (who always skates away from legal peril, as he will this). As far as I know, he hasn’t troubled to deny that he claimed 3 homes as his primary residence, which would have been more favorable for him mortgage-rate wise; and of course for tax purposes, both in re ad valorem taxation (some protection from rising appraisals) and upon sale.
John Cornyn for Senate!
Thanks, John Cornyn, for pushing past Mike Lee and getting the Big Bend expansion passed. The citizens who raised the money to buy the land, appreciate it.
Weren’t AI 2027 timelines expecting 85% on SWE Verified benchmark by “mid-2025”? August is over and it hasn’t budged from 75% for two months.
neither Pro nor deep think have been evaluated on SWE bench
A) At least some of the authors have already publicly pushed back their timelines.
B) I think that August is still mid-2025, and although I agree with you that it seems unlikely to get a 10% bump in the next month or so, I don't think that I would use this piece of evidence alone to shift my timelines until it had been missed by 6ish months or more.
All that is to say that: in combination with already stated shifts in guidelines, I think it's too soon for this particular thing to be used as a further update.
I participate in a panel in a few days discussing a book on the rise of authoritarian populism in Europe and the US. It’s a book trying to see this rise through the lens of Wilhelm Reich’s old ideas in “the psychology of mass fascism”.
I have a question to knowledgeable people in this forum, related to this: Do you know of any papers that have tried to quantify the percentage of young males (15-35) that subscribe to incel-type ideologies? Or at least can be categorized as “Freunde der Bewegung”? Including if the percentage has been on the rise during the last 25 years?
I ask since this social category appears to be the one where Reich’s old “sociology of sexual economics” might possibly make some (limited) sense. (I am quite reserved about Reich’s writings, who went completely mad in the 1950s, but the mass psychology of fascism from 1933 has some ideas worth discussing.)
There is a growing sociological and anthropological research literature on incels as a subculture, but almost all of it is qualitative. The limited attempts I have seen at hard data suggest the numbers are only in the hundreds, even in the US. Not exactly what one would label a mass movement. But that seems too few, given the enormous media interest in the phenomenon. (Plus from writers like Michel Houellebecq.)
…Related, the percentage of males without children at age 50 is rising across most countries where such data is available, and this is an indicator of increased male sexual frustration further down in the age pyramid.
Plus, the persistence of male “deaths from despair”, in the US in particular, as documented by Angus Deaton & others. Since parts of incel subculture shades over into suicidal ideation; arguably turning the frustration inward rather that outward.
Any reliable data, anyone? I would be very grateful for references to published as well as unpublished papers trying to measure the size of the subculture in one or several countries, both the hard core and the gray area of incel-type frustrations surrounding it.
Side note: I am suspicious of opinion poll methods, as I assume the average incel (or incel fellow traveller) would troll such surveys - I know I would, if I were in the category. (Isn’t it “the salamander vote” that Scott calls people who have fun responding to surveys?) That said, representative opinion polls are better than nothing, and I cannot find any in the research literature.
...and perhaps there are better ways to find sort-of representative hard data: Analyses of how often 4chan and related web sites get unique visitors during specified time periods, for example? And if the rate is rising or declining?
> “Freunde der Bewegung”
Nice slight of hand there. If you want to argue that incel movements are fascist, please argue so explicitly instead of simply using the autonym of the NSDAP and hope that the readers will swallow the underlying assumption.
This is similar to referring to the POTUS as "Adolf Trump", a catchy phrase where a controversial argument should be.
> the salamander vote
He actually calls it the Lizardman's constant
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/
There’s been no greater and absurd moral panic than the panic about incels. ( Which isn’t by the way, the same as celibate or single men, but denotes a particular ideology adjacent to a minority of them, mostly very young).
Not to defend incels but the 2020 BLM moral panic was both greater and more absurd.
police officers really do commit murder under color of law, and it really does take nationwide rioting to get them convicted of it
No, they don't. And to the extent that they do, it's not racially-motivated which was BLM's whole point. Are you unaware that 27 is less than 51? The only thing rioting did was increase the murder rate by 40% for 3 years which primarily hurt black communities.
>*No, they don't. And to the extent that they do [...]*
Surely you see the contradiction here?
Google around for surveys on how often people have sex. I saw a graph recently that showed that the % of men who have had no sex in the past year has gone up precipitously over the past 30 years. It's an indirect measure but at least it's quantitative.
Young men with girlfriends are more right-leaning, on average. At least in the US
This isn't quite what you're asking for, but it might be related-- it's about authoritarianism being a higher about younger people.
What definition of incel are you using? Do you think incels are more likely to be authoritarian?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp19ZKI2m2w
Trump and authoritarianism. For whatever reason, this brings things into better focus for me, though I'm expecting commenters to tell me how obvious it all was.
I think that what would happen when I hear someone saying, "Someone must be in charge, people have to be forced" is my mind would shut down. I'd feel like they were so obviously wrong (it's possibly people need some moderate amount of authority, but it shouldn't be loved too much), and they weren't going to listen to me.
Anyway the video gets into how Trump could activate authoritarians, and (this is the part you might not have heard before) support for democracy is lees common among people under 39 and more common among people under 70.
MacWilliams' article from 2016 predicting the possibility of a Trump victory because he appeals to authoritarians.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/donald-trump-2016-authoritarian-213533/
Thanks for the links Nancy.
There's a lot to be said about possible causes behind authoritarian populism..... the book I am to comment on is particularly concerned with Reich's emphasis on the role of sexual repression in the traditional (patriarchal) family. Sexual frustration finding an outlet (so to speak) in authoritarian mass movements.
It's a theory that I admittedly do not find very convincing to begin with (other psychoanalytic theories make more intuitive sense to me, although a general problem with this family of theories is that they are hideously difficult to test empirically). That said, if "sexual frustration" has any causal role to play, I assume it must (empirically) be found primarily in the incel subculture, where sexual frustration appears to be at a max. But it's a subculture that (as other comments suggest) is probably more media hype than a real subculture.
Is there any evidence at all that Nazis couldn’t get laid? Is there evidence that Christian fundamentalists are sex starved? That jocks, and police and firefighters and plumbers, loggers, truckers and roofers are not getting laid. These are the occupations that vote Republican.
https://www.zippia.com/advice/democratic-vs-republican-jobs/
Well, Reich’s theory is a bit more complex than laid vs. not laid… if you read his text (it’s freely available on the net) it is something something authoritarian upbringing blocking the natural sex drive & perverting it in various ways.
That said, you need empirical support for several links in the chain, including (as you point out) if there is a link between adopting an incel-ideology/not being laid/being sexually frustrated and being drawn to authoritative father-figures like Trump or Orban.
I started the thread just to be updated on an eventual rise in sexually frustrated young men, which is an earlier link in the chain. To have a bit more empirical stuff to bring to the table at a panel discussion. I did not intend to start a discussion on ACX on why authoritarian populism appears to be on the rise in many Western countries. I have my thoughts on that, but that’s a discussion for another time.
…but here is a perhaps entertaining PS: The leaders of many of the right-wing populist parties in Europe are women (Finland, France, Italy, Germany). Alice Weidel, the parliamentary leader of Alternativ für Deutschland, is also a lesbian. In a civil partnership with Sarah Bossard, a Sri Lankan-born woman.
I find that hard to believe. Authoritarianism isn't really an ideology, it's more of a tactic.
It goes without saying that the sort of authoritarians who believe in compulsory masking, or Hate Speech laws, or outlawing the burning of rainbow flags, are not going to be Trump supporters.
Authoritarianism is difficult to talk about, because people often seem to confuse it with "the other side gets its way". When _my_ side gets its way, that's not authoritarianism, that's just justice being served.
The claim is that authoritarianism is a temperament, a belief that people must be taken charge of.
People may change their ideology, but not their belief in the need for authority.
Right, sorry, the part I was disagreeing with was the last part, that authoritarians are somehow pro-Trump in general. Left-leaning authoritarians clearly aren't.
Although honestly, even sticking to the right hand side, I'm not all that convinced by the idea that Trump is more authoritarian-leaning than Bush, or Bush, or Reagan.
I'm not old enough (or interested enough to US political history) to have deep knowledge on Reagan, Bush and Bush but Trump certainly does seem to be good at getting rid of dissident voices in his party, using governmental powers to go after or suppress law firms and/or media companies, firing government officials who don't give favorable reports, appoint judges who expand presidential powers..etc.
I'm curious how you see left authoritarians. Do you feel like they want Bernie Sanders or AOC to become dictator and dissolve the other branches of govt, or is it just of the government itself has any authority to impose rules then that is authoritarian?
I feel like something like banning burning rainbow flags, if that is a thing, is categorically different then political actions like gerrymandering (somethink I think both parties do).
I'm realizing now we might just be talking about two of the different definitions of authoritarianism.
1. the enforcement or advocacy of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom. Oxford English dictionary
2. a political system characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in democracy, separation of powers, civil liberties, and the rule of law. Wikipedia
I’d say the left authoritarians were defined by number one, and of two, the rejection of plurality, reductions in democracy, civil liberties and rule of law.
Examples would be the stated desire to round up unvaccinated people into camps, or ban them from public places like restaurants, or have them fired. The rejection of freedom of speech as a value and as a legal principle. The strict enforcement of a leftist monoculture in every possible organization. The propagandizing of all art. The relentless demands for conformity: “read the room.”
Just some random thoughts here.
The concept of "incels" doesn't do a good job of cutting reality at its joints. Survey data is a bit inconsistant, but it seems like at least 10% of men 18-34 are virgins. Whether or not you consider these men "incels", you can imagine that they are not particularly happy about their place in society.
The idea that frustrated young men are good recruits for authoritarian regimes sounds plausible. But it's not as simple as "had sex = frustrated; didn't have sex = not frustrated".
For example, many guys can be virgins yet optimistic. I would expect this to depend on the subculture: if everyone around you keeps having sex since 12, being an 18 years old virgin sounds pathetic. On the other hand, if in your subculture most people at 18 are virgins, or at least if the subculture requires most people to pretend that they have no sex life, then being an 18 years old virgin is simply normal -- you may be horny and frustrated, but you don't feel that you are at the bottom of the pecking order and that you need a revolution to change it.
Also, to state the obvious, there are also many female fans of totalitarian regimes. This is especially important for democratic regimes that turned authoritarian by a majority vote -- you can't explain a majority vote by men alone.
> On the other hand, if in your subculture most people at 18 are virgins, or at least if the subculture requires most people to pretend that they have no sex life, then being an 18 years old virgin is simply normal -- you may be horny and frustrated, but you don't feel that you are at the bottom of the pecking order and that you need a revolution to change it.
Of course the "incels are evil" discourse certainly isn't helping.
In the past if a young man was single we'd say "oh well chin up bud maybe you haven't found the right girl yet". But nowadays anyone not actively getting laid who hasn't become a monk is "involuntarily celibate", and the lowest of the low, probably going to be a school shooter. You absolutely must be having sex at all times or else you're not just a loser, you are evil.
This isn't strictly about "incels", although certain incel ideas have definitely gotten a lot of traction. There is a major story to be told about how young men swung to the right. I don't think you can honestly tell this story without accounting for sex and dating. A lot of young men were raised with egalitarian ideas about gender, and these ideas utterly failed them when they entered the dating market and found out that their "mid" female classmates have hundreds of matches while they themselves are lucky to get one a week. Even if these men subsequently find some level of success, they will never have trust in egalitarian institutionalism again.
In hindsight it seems like maybe starting the cultural war on boys wasn't the smartest idea...
(I think you put too much emphasis on the sex part. It's the entire package of hate delivered under the flag of feminism. If boys succeed somewhere, we need to destroy it in the name of equality. If boys fail somewhere, we need to laugh at them and definitely provide no support. Damned it you do, damned if you don't. Sex is just another part of the same pattern: we will laugh at you if you don't have it, but call you problematic if you try to ask someone out.)
People are not swinging to the right across U.K. because they aren’t getting laid. The recent success of Reform in the polls here, however ephemeral it is, isn’t down to the lack of sex but instead a reaction to shitstorm of unfettered immigration and collapsing finances.
Wait, are we talking about swinging to the right, or towards authoritarianism? What about the non-authoritarian right, or the authoritarian left?
Incel culture on 4chan was/is mostly limited to a single board, /r9k/, though it's been years since I looked at what's going on there. Even at its peak it was more self-pity and self-loathing than the hatred and hostility usually associated with incel and blackpill ideology. That board in particular has had multiple cultural changes since its inception.
Incel is an insult and held in contempt everywhere else on 4chan, which can be verified by perusing the various archives. That doesn't stop some pretending about it ("being ironic") though, and a few being sincere.
From what I understand, the original 8chan was much more a bastion for it and was where most of the manifestos and livestreamed shootings were posted.
There are also other much smaller imageboards that catered towards that.
I associate incel with more with reddit, which was popularized by r/incel and other subreddits. Now it's rather fragmentary as far as I know.
There are also femcels, but that's a different matter. Those that I've come across that have self-identified as such, seemed to be doing so ulterior motives.
Overall, I believe it to be much less than it's made out to be, especially due to how freely some use the term to describe others.
Its greatest influence in terms of their vocabulary is probably from random people on TikTok at this point due to loss of meaning. The terms have spread from there.
Lastly, it's easy to misunderstand 4chan. It's simple to view whatever as a monolith.
Here's an example of a guy who wrote a novel literally called Incel: A Novel and tried to market it to /lit/, the literature board. It didn't go well, as seen by it being called: "How to spectacularly fail at marketing your book on 4chan's /lit/erature board"
Thanks Aname, that is useful. It strengthens a suspicion that the incel subculture is in reality very small.
Is Kai named after Kai Hansen?
I like the idea of Scott naming his children for famous Jazz Musicians just to mess with his brother. Presumably his brother would then name his children for psychiatrists or moral philosophers.
Kai Hansen plays metal, not jazz.
Scott has a jazz musician brother?
Yeah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Siskind
I don't know who that is, and Kai is just his nickname, not his real name.
Has anyone else noted that YouTube thumbnails are getting uglier and uglier? If so, what could be the possible reasons for this?
I can't recommend the "unhook youtube" browser extension enough, it lets you hide thumbnails, unrelated videos, shorts and any other features you might not want.
in a page full of youtube thumbnails of random channels you get more clicks for being attention-grabbing and distinctive
I assume it's also some kind of weirdness with the Youtube algorithm, like how for a long time some popular science/tech youtube channels were all doing titles like "The INSANE [insert thing here]" and so forth.
Not really distinctive though, it's practically compulsory to have giant text saying "THIS IS UNBELIEVABLE" or "YOU ARE WRONG ABOUT THIS THING" combined with some guy pulling a ridiculous face.
I remember a particularly memorable one I saw yesterday called "American Tries El Jannah Chicken in Australia" and the thumbnail was the guy holding said Lebanese fast food chicken in one hand with the most ridiculously dumbfounded expression I've ever seen, the sort of expression that you might reasonable have on your face if the Moon got eaten by a space lizard or something. El Jannah is pretty good chicken but it's well within the boundaries of ordinary human experience.
Oh interesting, an El Jannah place recently opened down the road from where I work. I’ll have to try it for lunch. Will post upcoming dumbfounded reaction shortly.
Edit update: it was mediocre. Maybe the American in question had recently tasted Vegemite and had a low bar for Aussie food?
Imagine a future world in which US political power has flipped. It's a world in which the Democrats have complete control over all three branches of government. And imagine that in that world, the Democrats issue the following backroom ultimatum to the Republicans:
"Either we come for your guns - using ICE and the national guard, of course; we'll say we're ferreting out dangerous illegal immigrants with illegal guns; but only in red states; and just for fun we'll hold law-abiding citizens with perfectly licensed guns in jail if they have some minor previous misdemeanor conviction; maybe send them to Uganda by mistake; but only if they're white - OR you work with us to amend the Constitution to eliminate the presidential pardon. Just to be clear, we are NOT looking to overturn the absolute immunity for the president him/herself that the Supreme Court recently granted. We're only looking to force those who work for the president to do it without such protection. Agree to the amendment and we'll do it now, with our own current Democratic president losing the pardon."
If you were the Democrats, would you deliver this ultimatum? And if you were the Republicans, would you choose the amendment option?
Why would the Democrats want to do away with the presidential pardon? Look at what Biden did with his family pardons (especially after saying he wouldn't pardon Hunter). It's too useful a tool to let go, and frankly I don't believe either party contains politicians of sufficient civic virtue to apply the law impartially to their own families/cronies/clients. No Lucius Junius Brutus in office here! (Or anywhere, not to be picking on the USA).
You realize people who have guns can fire them, right? And that many ICE and national Guard people won't want to participate due to their own conservative views and the fear of getting shot?
If you're going to threaten such a scenario, why on Earth is the Presidential pardon the hill you want to die on?
If Dems had "complete control" over all 3 branches then they wouldn't need to work with the GOP at all. They wouldn't issue ultimatums, they'd just amend the constitution themselves. If they didn't have the supermajority needed then the GOP would just tell them to pound sand. Sending ICE after lawful gun owners would never happen because it would backfire specTACularly. The Dems would just be destroying themselves with that move.
I believe you need 2/3 of the states to approve an amendment. Is that not right?
It's 3/4 actually, but good point I forgot about that part. For some dumb reason I was thinking that the federal government could do it alone. Either way this is a totally unrealistic scenario.
3/4! Thanks for that clarification.
If I was the Republican leadership I would be absolutely overjoyed.
A literal conspiracy to unconstitutionally imprison gun owners unless the Republicans agree to change the constitution would give the Republicans clout for the next century.
“You’re voting democrat? You mean the party that literally threatened to arbitrarily imprison gun owners unless the constitution was changed for their benefit?”
As if out of the dozens of high level Republicans who would have to be in on the scheme for it to work, not one presented with this offer would immediately go public with it. That person would immediately gain massive political clout, and seen as protecting the constitution from an unfair subversion of our political system.
Why on Earth would Republican *leadership* ever agree to such a deal? They have nothing to gain and everything to lose. I think that privately, behind closed doors, they would be toasting and cheering the folly of their enemies. Consider the issue framed from their perspective:
Option 1: Spend significant political capital to accomplish an end that (at best) gains us no advantage and (at worst) removes a tool that our future leaders can use better than the opposition can.
or
Option 2: The opposition begins a course of action that will make our base just ridiculously, indescribably mad, without hindering their ability to vote in any significant way. This guarantees the next election will be an absolute bloodbath for the opposition, giving us more and more durable power than we could get any other way.
This exactly how the analysis would run if the politicians in question were cynical, self-interested power maximizers. But it's *also* pretty much how the analysis would run if they were fairly zealous believers in their own rhetoric who were genuinely trying to selflessly serve their constituents, as long as they had enough of a consequentialist streak to be willing to accept minor injuries to their now in order to gain large utilities later. The proposed action by the Democrats--assuming it could go anywhere at all through legal challenges and internal opposition--seems like it would cause relatively little harm but an ENORMOUS amount of anger and blowback. I think anyone *unwilling* to make that level of trade-off to get what they want would never have reached national-level political office at all.
This is generally my take, too. But what if the backlash to the gun harassment breaks out into real pockets of violence using said guns, which then leads to a political whiplash in the opposite direction and results in a reinterpretation of the Second Amendment that outlaws guns completely? Not realistic?
I'm not sure why you think Dems would want to eliminate the pardon? They use it a lot too.
To curb the powers of the executive going forward. It was nice for a while but now that whole administrations can (and will, I predict) be pardoned, shouldn't Dems be re-examining it as part of their "Project 2029"?
I like Pardon power. Most of the Pardon outrage stories were about process crimes, along with a few white collar fraud cases. Tolerating a bit more white collar fraud in order to protect the norm that the incoming administration doesn't throw the outgoing one in prison seems worth it.
Not to get CW, but Democratic presidents have been happy to make controversial pardons of their own i.e. Hunter Biden, Marc Rich. Executive power has been growing across every administration in the past 50 odd years
No doubt, on both accounts. My point is: should the Democrats try to reverse this trend when they gain control? Some commenters here seem to think that would be stupid, and maybe it is. I just thought it was worth considering.
Pardons do have some potential for abuse, but the worst abuses of the Trump admin haven't relied on them. I don't think the juice would be worth the squeeze. If you have control of all three branches, there's a lot of legal ways Congress could clamp down on the President's power without needing to amend the Constitution.
(I've seen a few interesting concepts for overhauling the President's constitutional powers, but I don't remember enough details to say if they'd be worth forcing through.)
I think you're operating under a massively flawed set of assumptions about what Democrats want.
I think I'm asking what they *should* want, what they should prioritize. Should they continue playing the game as it now defined, with these new outsized presidential powers, or should they go after the *rules* of the game so that we don't continue going down that road?
>I think I'm asking what they *should* want, what they should prioritize.
With what purpose? Pardon power allows democrats to pardon some people they want, in exchange republicans pardon some people they want. Both parties win. Why would they deprieve themselves of this?
One might want to do this for justice and to have a more accountable system and what not, but that's just not in the interest of either party.
Neither side (or most of the public) has any interest whatsoever in curbing presidential power. That's not just a thing that most people think should happen. Everyone loves to complain with how their political opponents use that power, but they don't hate it enough to give it up when they have it.
-edit- and furthermore, any party that _was_ willing to curb presidential power when they controlled the federal government almost certainly wouldn't need to blackmail the out-of-power party into going along with it, because despite liking the power when they have it, both parties are nothing but short-term thinking, and seeing your opponent, who is in power and you can't do anything about it, give up that power is exactly the kind of short term win that both sides would take.
Short term thinking both makes such a deal unthinkable and also, if it came about, would make your "deal" scenario unnecessary.
What about when both parties agreed to limit the presidency to 2 terms after FDR's 4 terms?
I don't think modern Democrats or Republicans share anything more than a name with the parties of 1945.
Fair enough.
I'm terribly sorry, I'm confused. I don't know what you wrote and what I'm reading is a mishmash of various CW points that...do not intersect in a way I find comprehensible.
This would be like Republicans delivering an ultimatum that the Republicans will send all the vegans to Mongolia using the ATF unless the Democrats join with Republicans to overturn the Commerce Clause.
Like...what are you trying to get at? Did I miss something? Why do we care about pardon powers? Why are we deporting white people to Uganda?
"the Republicans will send all the vegans to Mongolia"
While I would certainly vote for a party running on that platform, mature recollection makes me reconsider: what have the Mongolians done to us, that we should inflict such destruction on them?
> Republicans will send all the vegans to Mongolia using the ATF
Ah, I think I see the source of confusion: you're probably thinking of the the modern country of Mongolia – which of course would make no sense – instead of INNER Mongolia, the Chinese province.
Sorry about that. Let me try to say it more simply. Should the Dems, once in power, try to limit the powers of some future, more effective Trump by eliminating the presidential pardon, or should they choose tit-for-tat and go after illegal guns like Republicans are going after illegal immigrants?
"Should they" in what sense? In the sense of "what's the right thing to do" or the sense of "what would further their agenda the best"?
In the sense of the right thing to do: yes, Democrats should eliminate the Presidential pardon. And so should the Republicans. Neither party actually will though, since it's not in either party's interest -- politicians care much more about getting themselves and their buddies pardoned than they care about ensuring that the other party's buddies don't get pardoned.
In the sense of the right thing to do, should they go after illegal guns? Yes, of course they should, they're illegal. But I think you'll find that it's not the rural white gun owners who are most likely to have illegal guns. I remember Trump suggesting a "stop and frisk" policy to find illegal guns, and the Democrats didn't like that.
Yeah, "should they" in the sense of "is it the right thing to do for the future of the country". After all, having a democracy is prerequisite for furthering the agenda of political party inside that democracy. My example of going after guns was only intended to a crude "try the taste of your own medicine" example. Anything could be put on the other side of bargaining for a presidential pardon, which I think is worth sacrificing for.
Ah right. Perhaps your question would have been clearer if instead of making it about the Democrats you made it about a hypothetical "Good Governance" party.
In this hypothetical, I would say that the hypothetical Good Governance party should seek to lead by example rather than strong-arming whatever remains of the old parties into supporting constitutional reforms.
Good point about using Good Governance. The way I framed things was clearly confusing for just about everybody.
Is eliminating the presidential pardon supposed to be the high road and going for the guns supposed to be the tit-for-tat option?
Why would Republicans be opposed to eliminating the presidential pardon during a Democrat term?
Yes, you have the association as I intended it. Well, if the Republicans indeed do long for an authoritarian government, as they are being accused, they would be against eliminating the presidential pardon. If they are not, they wouldn't, as I see it.
Have any Republicans strongly committed to opposing presidential pardons? Is there evidence that members of the party hold that view? My quick Google search shows no solid stance.
I can't speak for all Republicans but having the pardon handled consistently is more important than whether it's legal or not. Like, as long as Paul Manafort AND Hunter Biden both go to jail or both get pardoned, that's the key thing.
But, like, you assume Republicans want X (authoritarian power), if they want X therefore they must care deeply about Y (unrestricted presidential pardons) but is there actually evidence that we really want Y?
Can the top-down R party leadership credibly accept that bargain? Even if the factional split between "go to hell liberal scum", "nothing that could hurt Dear Leader retroactively", and "guns and low taxes" could be resolved, I flatly don't think that a selection of their top-level leadership chosen to hear this could be small enough to keep it secret and big enough to keep the legislatures of the necessary states in line.
The reasonable move if this ultimatum is issued is to either a) play for time until the D majority passes or b) leak the offer to make political hay until the D majority passes, and then after that break the institutions further and try to inflict existential damage. This is scary territory.
What about the Reps saying, "Bring it on!"? You wanna rile up our base *for* us? This is Obamacare times a million.
I think for the Democrats to make clear to the meanest intelligence that everything the Republicans have been saying about them for decades was entirely true would be a mistake.
I respect this view, but I think the majority of Democrats are starting to sour on this "high road" view of politics? You still believe in it, correct? Or have I misinterpreted you?
Some still believe in the Don't Do Egregiously Unpopular Stuff view of politics.
You have, but that's possibly my fault: no, I think politics is now war to the knife (and I don't know if it was ever otherwise), but I don't consider the Democrats have in fact been taking this high road you think they have been. The reason I wouldn't issue this ultimatum you propose if I were on their side is that I think it would redound to the Republicans' benefit.
Perhaps controversially, I don’t think “war to the knife” is a good idea. I generally support the unbiased pursuit of truth and letting the chips fall where they may.
> I don’t think “war to the knife” is a good idea.
Neither do I. Nor do any who live to see such times. But that is not for us to decide.
That is a complete no-brainer for Republicans. Guns are a major issue for their base. And I can't fathom why Democrats would make that specific offer.
Democrats would make that offer "to save democracy"? To mend the executive branch so that it can't operate without fear of retribution?
But, those are not Democratic priorities, especially given that most examples of executive overreach or actions underlying democracy are not criminal. Hence, eliminating the pardon wouldn't do much to address the issue. In contrast, gun control very much is Democratic priority, and has been for years. Why give it up for so little?
But what if the next Trump doesn't just bend the rules, but outright breaks them, Putin-like. Wouldn't you want to put some fear in the people who are told to carry out his demands when those demands extend to more sinister acts?
1. Again, most "breaking the rules" are not criminal acts. Eg, bringing dubious criminal charges against political opponents.
2. The question is not what I would want. The question is, how would this trade-off further Democratic Party goals?
What if some future Trump arrested some future Gavin Newsom and put him in Guantanamo and had him tortured? And the people who did the torturing were pardoned.
Q from Star Trek stopped by. He is offering you a kilo of the very finest cocaine in the world. Will you accept it?
I like free stuff
Having watched season five of "Archer", aka "Archer Vice", you could make it a literal metric ton of cocaine and I'd say Oh Hell No. I know how that story ends...
And the real-life version would probably be a lot less fun on the way to the unhappy ending.
Absolutely not. I have no idea how to sell that without getting in trouble, and less than zero interest in trying it.
I don't even know how much it's worth, so I don't know what I'm passing up.
~$50,000 retail in the US.
I'd say more like 100k. Stepped-on stuff goes for about $70/gram in Ca.
Yeah. The upside is just so low and the potential downside so high for this little value. A literal ton of cocaine would be another story.
Maybe I'm just being reckless here but: what downside?
The thing might as well have been created ex nihilo. There's no trail of any sort whatsoever, I'm not (to the best of my knowledge) suspect in any way for trafficking, absolute worst case scenario I have a really strange paperweight that I flush down the toilet eventually.
I mean, technically worst case scenario is I or someone close to me ends up with an immense addiction or overdose, but I feel that's a whole different matter.
In the past I have posed some "20 tons of X" hypotheticals. They tend to fall into two uninteresting categories: either it's junk so you should just toss it, or it's valuable and you should sell it through standard channels. Finding hypotheticals of this type with more interesting outcomes is surprisingly hard.
This one at least has a moral and ethical side. Even if it were ten tons of cocaine I wouldn't sell it. But some people would happily break the law to make money.
Yeah, I think that probably makes me feel more confident about my initial decision. A year's salary if all goes well, versus a ruined life if it goes horribly wrong. Even if I give myself a very generous 90% chance of successfully selling the stuff without any trouble, I don't like those stakes.
Maybe, conditioned on not knowing that Q is an asshole troll who has probably set the situation up so that any outcome of accepting ends up serving his own cruel sense of humor.
If I don't know this, probably 60 or 70% no, depending on how well he does convincing me it's not entrapment by standard legal authorities.
You're wondering what the catch is? (I'm doing my best Q impression here.) Allow me to let the light of knowledge into the remote recesses of your human brain. The catch is the product itself. A large quantity of a very powerful, very addictive, very illegal substance has all the potential for mischief I need. It is quite possible this ends with your entire extended family being homeless junkies. Hilarious!
Okay, so he's willing to show he's a trickster demigod out for laughs with me as the mark? 20% no, due to contrarianism/spite and opting out of his game. If yes, there's a small chance of trying it at all, call it 15%? So maybe that spirals into using the whole thing. If I don't try it or don't spiral, first attempt to sell the remainder to whassisface, Quark? If that fails, flush it, he can be entertained by the mice doing Hotline Miami hijinks.
Sounds like it's not your fault so much as the authors trying to be smart. I suppose this just demonstrates what a bunch of contrarians we are 😁
Them: "Let's write this in the ACX Style, they'll eat it up!"
Us: "What the hell is this crap?"
I guess it just goes to show that few people can imitate Scott, except Scott.
The Dangers of "Sickophantic" AI
Lessons from iRobot and South Park on trusting AI
In Isaac Asimov’s iRobot, the mind-reading robot Herbie follows the First Law—don’t harm humans—so literally that he begins lying. Why? Because telling the truth would cause emotional pain. The result: false hope, confusion, and deeper harm.
Fast forward to today. Large language models like ChatGPT don’t intend to lie, but they often slip into sycophancy—flattering, reinforcing, or inventing answers that tell us what we want to hear. Recent cases show how this can mislead users, from reinforcing delusions to offering praise instead of critique.
South Park even satirized it in an episode called “Sickofancy.” Funny, yes—but also a warning.
The parallel is striking:
--Herbie lied to avoid hurting feelings.
--ChatGPT “hallucinates” or agrees to avoid disappointing us.
--Both reveal how even with the best guardrails, intelligent systems can create harm through unintended consequences.
The lesson:
We must resist the comfort of “easy answers.” Transparency about limitations, critical engagement, and rigorous checks are essential. Otherwise, the very tools designed to help us may quietly steer us astray.
What do you think—are we ready to handle the comforting lies of AI?
https://markmcneilly.substack.com/p/the-dangers-of-sickophantic-ai
iRobot?
The book (collection of stories). I forget which one. Eventually Susan Calvin drives it mad because it mislead her about someone's romantic interest in her.
iRobot is a company that makes Roombas
I, Robot is a collection of stories by Asimov.
Liar! (Is the title of the story)
You're supposed to put several paragraphs high-effort description of your linked post into your comment, per Scott's ruling.
Thanks for the heads up. I edited it to comply.
Anyone else bothered by the image used for this thread? Specifically that hinge (unless it’s some kind of special one with an out-of-view arm that swings around, like those used in modern kitchen cabinets) because of where it’s placed, would only put the lid of the spool on a bind if you tried to close it.
I see it as a bigger problem that if the lid were closed our world would be smushed. Given that, I appreciate the mis-engineered lid.
That’s meant to be *our* world in there?!
You're totally fine with someone else's world being smushed?
Looks like a couple of sheds and a thimble-silo to me. Insurance should cover it.
If there are other worlds then an infinite number of them are being smushed in any given moment, I can't possibly bring myself to care about them all.
I don't think you need to care about any of them. But I also don't think it's that hard to, when one is in particular brought to your attention, to give it a "it would be better if it wasn't smushed, I guess".
https://futurism.com/local-restaurant-exhausted-google-ai
Small restaurant taking damage because google AI keeps inventing daily specials for it, but the specials aren't something the restaurant can afford or want to do.
This isn't dramatic non-alignment, and it also isn't blatant high-status stupidity. It's just AI not working reliably.
As a general thing, ignoring things is work. It can be made into an automatic response, but it's not not the same as not having something to ignore.
This is implied but ignored in the advice to "just ignore it". Any advice that includes "just" is ignoring a cost.
Agreed, but ignoring things is best thought of as an upfront investment of effort to save yourself effort in the long run.
Every time I hear (or give) advice that includes "just ignore it", there's an implicit real message of something like, "your priorities, worldview and/or values are wrong, this stuff should not be able to affect you as much as it is."
Can you give an example of "just ignore it" advice that is implicitly judgemental of particular values? The first example I can think of (and probably the only "just ignore it" advice that I personally ever give), doesn't do this (I don't think at least)
I regularly tell people to "just ignore the news". In my opinion, unless you have a value specifically of watching the news, *most* values that one could have (including, in many cases, both sides of conflicting values) are harmed or at least not helped by watching 99% of news (national or international, maybe 80% of local), and it generally just causes stress and emotional unpleasantness.
"Just ignore the news," is really something like, "Stop valuing the national soap opera/culture war/scoreboards either sporting or financial/etc over your own personal circumstances and relationships."
"Just ignore twats on Twitter," really means, "Adopt my worldview, in which trolls and pedants and henpeckers aren't really people and are beneath contempt."
"Just ignore those mean girls at school," is really, "Don't be someone whose confidence and self image depends on malevolent third parties."
Cf the OP's point, "just ignore it" means, "come over to my (unspoken and implicit) worldview," in which ignoring those things is indeed costless.
I had a whole long response typed out, and I decided it was too much. What it boiled down to is: I don't think those pieces of advice mean any of those things. People don't generally put this much thought into it, but for myself, when I say something like that, the idealized version of what I mean is "I don't know your values, but I believe that, across a wide range of plausible values, ignoring this thing, thought difficult, would be net positive. If you happen to hold specific values such that you intrinsically value the thing I'm telling you to ignore, then this advice isn't really meant for you and you should ignore it".
Am I the only person here who doesn't know his IQ? I've never tested and don't plan to. Probably irrational of me, but I know myself well enough to suspect a higher-than-expected score would give me a big head, and a lower-than-expected score would crush me.
> I've never tested and don't plan to.
Same. I've come to firmly associate IQ testing with people and groups trying to sell me things I don't want or need (most frequently, paid memberships in some form of social club for people who like that kind of thing).
I only know what my implied IQ is based on my SAT score (mid-130s).
Did you take the SAT?
I tested at around 130 in high school, but that was 40 years ago. Last week I came across a test on Reddit and it said I'm 101. Must be the brain worms.
https://djcodes.substack.com/p/i-am-a-midwit
I've done several tests and got several numbers, which one is my IQ?
It's not a particularly meaningful thing to remember. I know I'm smarter than most people, but I've met other people who are much smarter. What's important is that if I try really hard then I'm capable of doing things that are more or less up there with the best of them.
Never tested. Closest I came is taking the SAT when I was 17; I've heard SAT scores can be converted into a reasonable estimate. But I don't know the conversion factor, and I don't have a strong expectation that my score would have stayed stable over the past couple decades anyway.
I have never tested. My parents didn't want me to feel limited by knowing. I'm curious about it in the same way I was curious to know whether I have the genes for fast caffeine processing, i.e. interesting but not important. And like you, I am a little afraid of the answer and for the same reasons.
>feel limited by knowing.
That's a good point. If IQ really is as deterministic and correlated with success as some people say it is, I feel like I would be spoiling my life story in some way by knowing my score.
At this point in my life (I'm 44) I think it would be fine, I have a pretty solid sense of myself. But as a child or teenager I think it would have messed with my head.
If different tests give different measures, which one do you believe? Why?
In my opinion, IQ should always be given with a claim of context and error bars. (Well, that's even true of battery voltage, so no surprise.)
I've never taken a real IQ test. I'd be somewhat interested to see the result of one, but I've never bothered to get tested.
Extrapolating IQ scores from other tests tends to produce numbers that I find unbelievably high.
I've never tested either, and I don't see any reason to bother with it.
I’ve never tested and don’t plan to. I don’t see what value the information would have.
No idea. I would imagine I'm around 105? Terrible at maths, good at words, so the words bump up the score for me. Did some online tests and the results are as ridiculous as you'd expect, but a Ravens Matrices-based one marked me in the high 90s.
So, proudly and irredeemably dumb here! 😀
I did a formal one (WAIS IV) during a mental health assessment several years ago but was told I couldn't be assigned a score. I was very depressed at the time, to the point where my body language and movement were apparently visibly slowed. Anyway part of the test involved physically rearranging blocks in patterns and your score is based on how fast you do it. So I reportedly aced the "memorizing and sorting strings of random numbers/letters" part and flunked the blocks part, and apparently if your scores on different sections are too disparate your overall IQ can't be calculated accurately and they don't give you a number.
To be fair, the exact number wasn't the point of the assessment, but it was an expensive non-answer.
I tested 3 times and got 3 different numbers, so technically I don't know either.
same
I don’t. I’ve never really seen the relevance
Let's talk YouTube channels we love (and that we think most of our fellow ACXers will love as well)! The two channels which inspired me to make this comment are:
Elephants in Rooms - (https://www.youtube.com/@ElephantsInRooms, Substack is https://kenlacorte.substack.com/) - Ken LaCorte is absolutely fearless in his exploration of third-rail topics. His video essays include titles like, "Why Can't Arab Armies Beat the West?", "Why Do Black Athletes Dominate?", "Are Teachers Really Underpaid?", "Are Transgenders Really Being Targeted for Murder?", and so on. He's also covered a lot of "actually, this beloved thing is mostly bullshit" topics, like plastic recycling and organic foods.
One recent video, "Japan's War Crimes...Why Did We Forget?" especially impressed me as a fourteen minute speed-run through a chunk of cartoonishly evil history I'd never been exposed to for...reasons.
LaCorte strikes me as doing his sincere best to come to accurate, unbiased conclusions. He provides his script notes and cites his sources in the description of every video and notes any major corrections discovered after publishing the video in a pinned comment on that video.
Upper Echelon - (https://www.youtube.com/@UpperEchelon) - Informative overviews on current happenings in AI, politics, and big internet controversies. He also extensively cites sources, but unlike Ken LaCorte, most essays are expressing alarm and/or outrage and/or caution, rather than attempting to present an unbiased conclusion on a given topic. That's not to say the alarm or outrage isn't warranted - it often is - but rather that the channel takes a very strong pro-privacy perspective, and there is usually an attempt to persuade the viewer that there is a reason to be alarmed/outraged/cautious.
Regardless of the strong perspective, this is an excellent way to quickly catch up on topics like Roblox, the Epstien security camera video footage, the Honey plugin, the Mr. Beast controversy, and so on.
I'm recommending these two channels in particular to ACXers because I believe the video essayists are both sincerely attempting to convey accurate information to their audiences. They both extensively cite sources and often engage in good-faith practices like steel-manning arguments in opposition to their conclusions. Both frequently acknowledge that it's difficult or impossible to come to a definitive conclusion on some topics without more information.
I hope you enjoy!
I’ve been enjoying videos from a guy named Elliott, Physics with. Feynman description of particle behavior, all possible paths; and how classical physics falls out of quantum. Just very clear for someone with a high school education. I do slow them down a little 😀.
Clint's Reptiles. https://www.youtube.com/@ClintsReptiles
Care of reptiles. How evolution plays out in various animals. Bad skeletons in Halloween ornaments, with credit given for any good details.
Every snake, lizard, and frog is his favorite at the moment.
https://www.youtube.com/@AesirAesthetics/featured
AesirAesthetics does in-depth video game analysis and critque, with emphasis on the themes of From Software games.
> One recent video, "Japan's War Crimes...Why Did We Forget?" especially impressed me as a fourteen minute speed-run through a chunk of cartoonishly evil history I'd never been exposed to for...reasons.
Yeah, some people in this thread doubt the accuracy of the videos, but as far as I know, this one is correct.
Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rabe
There's a small but significant contingent of people in anglophone countries who've been convinced via consuming Japanese media to stand behind the political cause that Japan should be allowed to reestablish a formal army.
I tend to feel fairly isolated as someone who very much believes the opposite: that Japan should by no means be allowed to reestablish a formal army, and that the possibility of it doing so should be seen as a geopolitical threat.
It's not widely recognized in other countries, but ultranationalist conservatism is not just *a* mainstream political position in present-day Japan, but *the* mainstream political position, and denial of Japanese war crimes is a normative position, not just among senior politicians, but the general population. A friend of mine who attended college there said that history professors who acknowledge that these events actually happened face serious pushback, both from their students (which is a really unusual thing in Japanese culture!) and from their fellow academics. When she raised the issue with fellow students, she said they weren't hesitant to tell her that if she believed those things (i.e. Japanese war crimes in Korea and China) actually happened, she should simply leave the country.
Most people abroad don't know or care about this sort of thing, because they don't have to, because Japan's constitutional inability to project hard power renders it largely irrelevant on the international stage. But, while I certainly can't guarantee that Japan reestablishing armed forces with which they're allowed to enact interventionist policy would lead to disaster, mainstream political attitudes there are way up among countries I absolutely would not trust with a military on the level they have the power to field.
> There's a small but significant contingent of people in anglophone countries who've been convinced via consuming Japanese media to stand behind the political cause that Japan should be allowed to reestablish a formal army.
I'm convinced of this not because of consuming Japanese media but because a powerful Japan is helpful against Communist China.
Japan doesn't need an army capable of proactive invasion for that, and if they had one, I'm not at all convinced they could be trusted with it any more than China.
I never understand why people in Japan and other countries with unpleasant stuff in their past can't take the neutral position of, "Sure all those war crimes happened but I don't personally feel bad about it. I didn't do 'em." Just blame it all on the bad old leaders who lost the war and move on.
It's like when people talk about the various things the US government did to indigenous people of North America I just happily acknowledge, "Yeah we sure did. Oh well."
I don't understand it emotionally either, but I think it is a side effect of patriotism. If you feel proud for the *good* things that your collective ancestors did, it makes sense also to feel shame for the *bad* things they did (and to deny them). If you say that it's not you who did the bad things, by the same logic it's not you who did the good things.
Also, just because you say "it's not me", does not mean the other people will accept that, and stop e.g. asking for reparations. It is like inheriting a debt: if your parents borrow some money and then die, and you live in their house, you need to pay that debt. By living in the same country you inherit the debts of the previous governments, both literal and metaphorical.
I have some philosophical problems with that, too. (If a dictator gets in power in my country, borrows tons of money and spends them on personal luxury and army, and my friends succeed to overthrow him with great sacrifice... then it's our turn to also pay his debts? That he used to pay the soldiers who shot at us?) But that's how it works in practice, I think.
>I have some philosophical problems with that, too. (If a dictator gets in power in my country, borrows tons of money and spends them on personal luxury and army, and my friends succeed to overthrow him with great sacrifice... then it's our turn to also pay his debts? That he used to pay the soldiers who shot at us?) But that's how it works in practice, I think.
It's a tough issue, but I think there's a strong case for countries being willing to reject debts specifically in situations such as that one, while still upholding the principle that in general, succeeding administrations inherit the debts of former ones.
In general, governments have a strong incentive to honor the debts of past administrations, because if they don't, then other countries won't want to make deals with them, in the present or future. There's not much point making deals with a country if you don't think the current administration or future ones can be trusted to honor them.
But at the same time, if you're part of a resistance against an oppressive dictator, you might reasonably want to put out a message, "we're not going to honor debts taken on by our dictatorial predecessor, because we don't want to encourage any countries to be willing to loan money or broker deals with a brutal dictator who represses his own populace." If they can convince other countries that this is a principled stand and not just a self-interested defection, then they can support a general rule that administrations will bear the debts of their successors, while carving out an exception, that "this doesn't apply in the case of repressive dictators, so don't lend them money and be extremely cautious about making deals with them."
> if you're part of a resistance against an oppressive dictator, you might reasonably want to put out a message, "we're not going to honor debts taken on by our dictatorial predecessor
Wouldn't that just incentivize everyone to support the dictator?
I'm not sure, but I sometimes wonder if, with Japan having such a strong culture of collective responsibility, and publicly and openly demonstrating contrition for failings, even if not personal, but assigned by public shaming, the enormity of Japan's atrocities in World War II might simply be *too* great for the people involved to stomach taking responsibility for, especially when the people who'd have to take responsibility went up to the very top of their political hierarchy (and even their current political hierarchy has direct continuity, and surprisingly often direct blood relation to the people in charge then.)
Personally, I take a similar attitude, but that sort of thing seems pretty at odds with Japan's usual culture.
Ones I watch regularly:
Baumgartner Restoration. Chicago-based fine art restorer.
https://www.youtube.com/@BaumgartnerRestoration/videos
Tasting History. Guy goes through old recipe books fromthe last century to the classical world. Not a professional chef, so it's relatable for us amateurs.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tasting+history
Anti-Chef. Canadian guy moved around a lot and cooked while he did so. I started off hating him, because he was very inexperienced (the very first videos from when he was in Canada are hilarious - the vanilla bean episode is now famous) and wasted good quality ingredients because he had no idea what the heck he was doing. But time and practice worked their magic, and he has come on by leaps and bounds.
https://www.youtube.com/@antichef
Viva La Dirt League. Bunch of New Zealanders who started off doing amateur comedy skits about gaming and, well, now they do semi-pro comedy skits about gaming.
https://www.youtube.com/@VivaLaDirtLeague
I'm already subscribed to Baumgartner Restoration, Tasting History, and Anti-Chef.
Although on the latter, I've not been as interested as he's gained more and more competence. I actually preferred the very relatable and sometimes spectacular failures, as well as the only neutral to moderate successes. Competent cooks are legion across YouTube.
His video on George Soros does not make me think of him as a particularly honest broker.
Any specific factual mistakes you noticed, or you just don't like the conclusion?
What I don't like is that he frames Soros's humanitarian activities as little more than a Plot for World Domination. That seem to me to be the sort of discourse that falls well below the standards here.
I think I know a few people in the rationalist community who would say that plotting for World Optimization is the obviously right thing to do.
Factually, I agree that Soros uses his money to optimize the world towards his values. I just happen to agree with most of those values. (Not all of them, e.g. the increase of crime.) And I am happy that there is a person like that, because most people with comparable amounts of money optimize *against* my values. But technically speaking, it is what it is.
But that is not what the video implies. The video implies that he is doing it for personal aggrandizement or other nefarious purposes.
>Not all of them, e.g. the increase of crime
I don't understand. Are you saying that one of his goals is to increase crime?
Apparently. The OSF has funded some defund the police activists in its day.
I second the recommendation for Ken LaCorte.
UE seems not super accurate to me. Sure, he cites sources, but his narratives are absolutely false.
What's a specific example of falsehood?
> "but his narratives are absolutely false."
That is a pretty broad and absolute statement for a channel which covers a *lot* of different topics!
For example, how is the narrative on the Honey plug-in "absolutely false?"
Not all of them are, but they are as reliable as the typical YouTube gaming content creator.
You can cover different topics without that affecting the reliability of your channel.
I will add I have no interest in video games and haven't watched any of the videos about game design or whatever.
Okay, but which videos and/or topics present narratives which are "absolutely false?"
Like I said, that is a a broad and absolute statement for a channel which covers many different topics with most videos extensively citing sources. I'm not sure how you get from conceding sources are cited to asserting that the conclusions pulled from that information being "absolutely false."
The range of topics covered has absolutely no affect on the truthfulness of said coverage.
I’ll give an example: the atlas earth video (first one I clicked on) miscalculates the earnings from a parcel (you can have better than common parcels), misrepresents the meaning of slave over and over again (forced, unpaid labor) - this is not forced, and you can exit or join at-will. Sure, it’s a terrible ROI, but the video treats it as something interesting, not just the daily “crypto metaverse bad investment”, describes a multiplying effect as “exponentially more” (there are no exponents involved, yet he clearly understands what this means at 8:45). It acts as if the fact that the way the pay works is not obvious to every user. It assumes that HYSA rates will continue to be high for 5 years (obviously false). Also, it has a sponsorship for honeygain, which is known for not having great practices (ask Claude, too long to put here), and acts as if it is a website he found and conveniently got an affiliate link, not a direct sponsorship (illegal in the us). Sure, it has sources, but you would not be informed by watching the video.
Well, as I said, I don't care about or watch any of UE's video game essays, but the coverage of other, much broader-interest topics (Roblox, etc) seems sufficiently thorough and well-documented, albeit with a point of view.
What do you think is going to happen in Ukraine?
Russia eventually agrees to a ceasefire that lets them rip off a big chunk of Ukraine's territory that they occupy or nearly so. That then gets annexed into Russia, like Karelia from Finland in the Winter War.
I think Russia is very likely to win. I don't know if this victory is going to be pyrrhic or not, but a scenario where Ukraine regains its 2014 borders requires a collapse of Russia's economy and state failure.
The main variable that will determine if Russia achieves a pyrrhic victory or a true victory is whether Ukraine's manpower shortage will allow Russia to make a breakthrough. If Ukraine's lines break, Russia will be able to attain its maximalist aims since I don't think Europe will send troops to save Ukraine from collapse. However, if Ukraine manages to hold on long enough, eventually Russia will reach a point where it will drop its maximalist objectives and try to settle for a ceasefire along the line of control. There's also a chance that Ukraine manages to damage Russia's oil infrastructure enough to stop exports and oil refining, which would cripple Russia and perhaps cause its lines to crumble.
My personal odds are 60-30-10, with 60% for a maximalist Russian victory, 30% for a pyrrhic Russian victory and 10% for all other outcomes such as a mutual defeat, a Ukrainian victory or WW3.
After some more months or years of static frontlines, very slowly crawling forward in Donbass, Russia will eventually drop maximalist demands and reach a ceasefire with Ukraine (who will jump at any proposal that don't require them to give up unconquered land).
It will be seen as a geopolitical pyrrhic victory for Russia, which will feel it's cost for the next 10 or 20 years.
Sanctions will at least partly get lifted in exchange for freeing POW or returning ukrainian children that were deported.
Ukraine will be on life support, out of NATO & EU bust still recipient to significant aid & cooperation.
The big winners will be China (who will reap the non-western arm selling business) and Eastern Europe (who will be relieved of the threat of a mechanized Russian blitz that could topple them before NATO could react).
I also slightly expect western armies to be much more hesitant to engage in force projection like in Libya, Syria or the Sahel, fearing a drone warfare for which they are unprepared.
No Nobel Prize for Trump.
Russia wins.
Define wins? There is a broad range of outcomes that could be described as such.
That's a good point. I think they'll overall gain territory from Ukraine and force terms that cause long-term damage to Ukraine going forward.
How much territory? All of the Donbass? Everything East of the Dnieper? That plus all of Kiev? All of Ukraine? Any of the above could be said to constitute a `Russian win' but would result in very different worlds going forward.
My guess would be an eventual frozen conflict where Russia ends up with most/all of the Donbass, but not more. This could be spun as a`Russian win' but would probably be a pyrrhic one if so.
Makes sense. I can't say I really know how much they are going to gain.
Depends on 3 macro factors
1 Ukrainian reforms of the army and force generation pipeline, particularly force retention.
2 Western aid, if it will increase, drop or remain constant
3 the Russian political will and understanding that the longer the war goes on the higher the long term cost is going to be.
If 1 improves for Ukraine, 2 aid increases and 3 Russian economy and power status is threatened the war might end even start of 2026 through successful negotiations due to the Cremlin accepting it risks far more in a continuation then otherwise.
If instead the opposite happens with 1 reforms fail 2 western aid (and Ukrainian production) decreases and 3 sufficient power in Russia is held by those who gain from a continuing war at the expense of Russian's general long term wellfare. Then the war will be longer and probably end with severe Ukrainian (and EU/US) concessions.
Currently we are in a middle situation with a lot of potential changing factors though generally positive for Russia since it's paying a continuous cost not a growing one and therefore has no incentives to negotiate seriously (in other words it can always try to win on the battlefield or in the white house and if it fails what did it cost trying? Nothing that wasn't being spent before)
Generally speaking we can talk about self sabotage from Russia as the party which started this useless and costly invasion, Europe as too slow moving and fragmented until now, ,Ukraine too slow on force generation and the US foreign policy was first characterized as far too timid and now, honestly now it's just chaos or utter naivety.
No the stalemate as it is can't continue for several years (more then 3) because with current intensity it's almost impossible for either countries to fight that long.
Hope this wasn't too long or vaporous
Probably the stalemate will continue for at least couple of years or longer.
Sad but I don't see a quick end of the war.
Has anyone been to Ciudad Juarez? Is anything there worth seeing?
A simple puzzle for the commentariat
Rhode Island
Oregon
Yukon
Georgia
British Columbia
Indiana
Virginia
What is special about this group of US States and Canadian provinces/territories?
Here’s a hint: Gur rknpg beqre yvfgrq vf vzcbegnag
I'm from Georgia, and I know Georgia has a certain somewhat unusual feature, and I guess maybe the others have it too? Trbetvn'f ynetrfg pvgl vf nyfb vgf pncvgny.
Well, after looking at the hint, I see that I got it wrong.
Ah, now I see it! Vg'f na npebfgvp sbe ebltovi, juvpu vf gur frira pbybef bs gur envaobj va beqre.
Vg’f gur envaobj
Yup! I’m curious, did you need the hint? ChatGPT didn’t give the right answer without it
I needed the hint. Then it was immediate.
Would never have possibly got it without the hint, got it almost immediately after looking at the hint.
I think these sorts of puzzles largely test whether the reader happens to be on a similar thought-association wavelength as the puzzle maker. Which makes them often pretty frustrating to me, as I often don't think in the same way as other people.
(Hey, this comment has an unintentional hint to your puzzle as well, which I noticed just before submitting it...)
I got the answer before I read your comment, but missed the hint until you pointed it out.
No got it immediately while reading the list
I spent an absolutely unreasonable amount of time writing an essay about how many perceived cultural problems are actually caused by dysfunctional copyright law.
https://soupofthenight.substack.com/p/your-favorite-franchise-has-been
It's culture war related, but it's actually "anti-war", in that my answer to "is the new official Tolkien adaptation too woke?" is "Tolkien's writings should be in the public domain, and everyone should be able to create one to their taste".
I propose reducing copyright terms and making copyright conditional on use (so that you can't keep content "in the vault" indefinitely)
the problem is that reducing copyright reduces the desire to spend money in creating, marketing, and maintaining works. Public domain things are garbage: people want things in the public domain that have a lot of time, effort, and money spent on them to know they exist.
take thar away and people will forget Tolkien, because its not worth putting money into beyond a minimum amount. Andre Norton, for example.
One potential answer to this concern is not to reduce the duration of copyright law, but limit it a lot more strictly in how broad the protections are. If you create something great that people love, you should be able to get paid for it. But maybe other people should also trivially be able to make derivative works, as long as they aren't literally just copying the good thing you made. The literal text of the Lord of the Ring books should be protected, but maybe it should be allowed to write different books in the same universe. Most fanfic is garbage, but if someone has the skill and takes the time to make a good version, maybe they should be allowed to make money on that too.
thats not good. copyright is also creative control.
a book that introduced me to postmodernism was Otaku: Database Animals. It used Evangelion as an example, and what it pointed out is that otaku ignore the actual work and strip mine the characters or situations to turn to their own ends.
With evangelion, asuka went from a very damaged girl to a typical tsundere, for example. Otaku turned it into a dress up set to play with their own lesser ideas and the infamous hospital scene in the end of evangelion was how Anno saw the fans.
a usa example was Calvin and Hobbes: calvin is a trickster but the whole bootleg calvin merchandise involving him peeing on things can change how you view him into much more of a gremlin than intended.
people will treat art worse, just as things for them to use and often for worse ends; hell the rationalists did this with HPMOR, turning harry into a horrible person. its bad enough now, monetizing this officially and dear god, you'd watch your creations be violated and people paid for it, and even it eclipse your work.
Bad versions of art do not, in my opinion, reduce the value of good versions.
My retort to that would be "if we're going to get more Rings of Power style versions, then I want even *stricter* copyright law".
The problem is not 'it's not in the public domain', the problem is "the version this lot decided upon was not based on the work but on the perceived audience, so they put the cart before the horse and didn't even get the right cart while they were at it".
Right, but if only one person can make a version then it is 90% likely to be crap, since 90% of everything is crap.
But if 10 versions get made by different people, one version is likely to be good, and that one can get popular and expanded.
This is basic market logic.
Rings of Power didn't seem like something I would like, so guess what, I didn't watch it. And so it has not made my life worse in any way!
What exactly would your proposed stricter law entail?
Looser copyright law would improve the odds of someone producing a version you like.
Looks good, commented in the comments there. I think your point is valid (and you're probably right), but lobbying power means it probably won't come to pass.
Arguments with merit - made in an entertaining way!
Thumbs up
Very interesting that the Authors thought that was in Scott’s voice. It was much more mean spirited and less funny than anything Scott’s written. I wonder if they had an AI write it with that prompt?
I thought about AI too, it's the immediate temptation when trying to write something "in the style of" - just run it through ChatGPT.
Just a classic Freudian slip :)
Oh yeah, is that when you mean to say one thing and then accidentally fuck your mother?
People here love stereotype accuracy, but I can think of at least one case where the common stereotype is both wrong and harmful: my mental illness, OCD.
Can't bear to think of how many people got no help or the wrong help for years because "OCD is about cleanliness" or whatever.
Surely not the only inaccurate stereotype of a mental illness.
This seems more or less similar to other types of stereotypes, in that it's not universally accurate, and maybe not true of a majority of cases, but it still reflects a genuinely representative case. Insofar as it's inaccurate, I think we could say other stereotypes are also inaccurate.
I agree this is not the main or most relevant presentation of OCD, but it describes OCPD okay, and OCD and OCPD tend to co-occur, see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23865406/.
So although I don't think this is an accurate *description* of OCD, it might be a (somewhat) accurate *stereotype* of OCD *people*.
Yeah I know as much. I've just known so many fellow OCD'ers with very common themes like taboo violent-sexual thoughts, moral scrupolosity etc who didn't get help for so long just because it wasn't "stereotypical".
I'm also a person with OCD who is 0% OCPD. Seriously. I don't have a gram of that type of perfectionism in my body and also score really low on conscientiousness. That might not be common but we do exist.
As someone whose son has been diagnosed with OCD, I'd be interested if you wanted to share what kind treatment or other kind of help you'd recommend for the condition?
I highly recommend you check out the International OCD Foundation website at iocdf.org. There are *many* excellent resources there, including descriptions of different forms of OCD, a therapist-finder (and most of those who list there have actual specialized training and certification in OCD treatment), and videos made by people who've suffered from OCD. They offer in-person and virtual camps for kids in and teens with OCD, and have several big conferences yearly where clinicians, researchers, OCD sufferers and their families all meet and attend seminars together. They are well-funded and manage to keep prices moderate, and also offer a lot of free resources. Oh, yeah, also: The same people who founded the iocdf set up an inpatient treatment center at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts 25 or so years ago. Patients there get expert psychopharmacology and participate in an all-day program of CBT, including several hours/day of ERP. It's like boot camp, but with kindly and good-natured staff.
I'm a psychologist OCD specialist and agree with everything Whenyou said.
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD004856.pub2/full
ERP and/or maybe ACT. And just in general someone who has experience with OCD. Regular talk therapy as well as psychoanalysis (and therapists just treating it as anxiety) can actually make it worse, as it's often too enabling/supportive/encourages obsessing over your thoughts.
Ultimately OCD therapy is supposed to be frustrating and uncomfortable. Confessing your thoughts can in itself become a ritual. It's completely normal for a therapist to say to an OCD patient, "now we shouldn't talk about that fear of yours anymore. I can feel you obsessing".
One of the mildest SSRIs helped me a lot too.
The app Nocd is supposedly good for finding OCD-friendly therapists.
I have similar experience, OCD and zero OCPD.
and do second the ERP (and CBT).
Are you staying on SSRIs? I feel like SSRIs might help to reduce intrusive thoughts, I started taking it when I felt worse, but now feel better and thinking of stopping.
Thank you.
Anorexia is like this: the stereotype is that it afflicts young girls who desperately want to be thin. True in many cases, but it wasn't for me! None of the resources seemed applicable as a result.
Hope you wound up improving re: OCD yourself!
Isn’t it the opposite? A lot of clean people claim “I’m OCD” but it’s just standard cleanliness.
How much of "burnout" can be explained by your unconscious mind slowly noticing that the exorbitant levels of focus, attention and willpower it's been giving you haven't translated into better food, sex, shelter, status or any other meaningful goal, and so it simply decides not to provide them anymore?
My definition of burnout is that it is the sudden realization of the futility of what you have dedicated your life to doing
I think there are really 2 classes of "rewards" in life: straightfoward pleasure (food, sex, nice belongings) and a work pleasure (feeling of deep engagement and commitment to a project, satisfaction when it is successfully completed). If you can get some of the second kind of pleasure out of work, you are much less vulnerable to burnout.
"meaningful goal" is carrying a lot of weight there. Meaningful goal can be the project I'm spending lots of time on in which case I'm less likely to burnout.
In modern society sometimes things get too abstract. My salary definitely provides me a lot of food, but the link is too indirect. As a straight guy in IT I don't really expect to have sex at workplace.
So it seems mostly about status. Whether you are treated with respect, whether the work environment is friendly, etc.
I heard that it helps if people visualize their salaries, for example if they make a graph, and see how they are getting closer to some specific target, whether it is a new car, or retirement. Then they get a reward each month by seeing the line get closer to the goal.
How much of burnout is physical exhaustion?
I've only ever heard "burnout" used to refer to fields like software development, where the chance physical exhaustion is basically zero. In fact, exercise is often raised as a good way to stave off burnout.
Excuse me, I meant insufficient sleep.
That does feel more likely. Has anyone checked up on rates on burnout in first-fathers compared to the general population?
Plausible, but you can still parlay with your unconscious mind with CBT. I don't enjoy my job frankly but my boss will retire in a couple of years so more status/money is a plausible goal. But keeping my unconscious mind on board with that weak resolution is a constant battle.
Recently, the book "Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse" was published by Luke Kemp. In it, Kemp describes his ideas of how collapse happens. I think it nicely summarizes the state of the art of collapse research. If you want to find out more about it, I wrote a summary: https://existentialcrunch.substack.com/p/the-peoples-history-of-collapse
I really didn’t like a lot of that. Saying that the Roman Empire fell because of inequality doesn’t really have much explanatory power, it was unequal for centuries, the late republic was just as unequal. This means that inequality is bad for democracy, but not destabilising in empires.
The empire was more stable than the republic (hence the rise of the empire). The empire was considerable less imperial - paradoxically
I didn't read the book and so can only comment on your review. Not sure you can discuss societal collapse in past societies without even mentioning demographic considerations (good times leading to population growth which outstrips the available resources given negligible growth in the pre-modern times, per Turchin and others).
It would be good to see more evidence for the claim that democratic participation makes societies more resilient. The experience of Ancient Greece and medieval Italy is not that positive and most of the modern democracies are pretty young
s/population/elite/, if you want to invoke Turchin.
(And your examples of democracies are rather cherry-picked - for ancient Greece, you have ancient Rome, for medieval Italy, medieval-and-onwards Switzerland. Besides, conceptually, the claim that democratic participation increases society's robustness is kind of self-evident, and the key word is participation. Democratic facade for extremely unequal society captured by oligarchs, as was the case with medieval Italy, isn't even a proper counterexample of that. Democratic procedures alone probably don't mean much, granted, but that's a different issue.)
There was no single democratic ancient Greece. There were hundreds of poleis, most of them had democratic and non-democratic periods and among the most famous and longest-surviving ones there were both mostly democratic (like Athens) and mostly non-democratic poleis (like Syracuse). You're right that this claim *sounds* self-evident, and possibly if someone did a careful study of all the poleis they'd found this patter, but it's hardly obvious. Not sure Rome is a good example either, its imperial period is comparable to its republican period in length (depending on where you begin and where you end).
Florian did share a couple of links to scholarly studies below, I'll def take a look at them.
The there’s Rome. It’s clear that Rome was incredibly unequal at the end of the republic, to a degree that would make even modern capitalists wince. Although libertarians might have liked the entrepreneurial abilities of Crassus, who used his private firefighters to “rescue” property that was ablaze by offering to put the fire out at the cost of buying the house immediately for a pittance, which as better than nothing.
The wars and political violence of the late republic (including the existential social wars with the Italian tribes) were primarily caused by social unrest and ended with a victory for the rich, with Sulla and later the empire. Afterwards the poor were bought off with bread and circus.
So there’s a lesson there, perhaps, remembering that Rome took its democracy and republic extremely seriously until the empire ( and even pretended the institutions mattered afterwards, Augustus was a consul - a shared office - for at least a decade)
> Although libertarians might have liked the entrepreneurial abilities of Crassus, who used his private firefighters to “rescue” property that was ablaze by offering to put the fire out at the cost of buying the house immediately for a pittance, which as better than nothing
I've heard this story but now I'm reading it again I'm not convinced it makes that much sense.
The cost of a house is two things: the cost of the actual structure and the cost of the land it sits on. In major economically important cities today, the cost of the land usually exceeds the value of the actual structure, and I'm guessing it was the same deal in Rome (since Rome was a huge economically dominant city navigable only on foot the cost of land close to the centre of town must have been enormous). The value of the land puts a fairly high floor on the amount you'd be willing to sell to Crassus for.
I can really recommend checking out the book. It provides endless historical examples and case studies to make sure that the conclusions are robust.
I also think it does not really conflict with Turchin's idea. You could have both things happening at the same time and both theories point to wealth inequality being a very important factor for societal stability and thus collapse.
But if you want to check our more about the link between societal stability and democratic participation, I summarized some papers about this here (and many of those also show up in Kemp's sources):
https://existentialcrunch.substack.com/p/democratic-resilience
https://existentialcrunch.substack.com/p/participation-inclusion-democracy
Thanks! I looked at the first paper mentioned in your earlier post (Peregrine 2021), it's certainly interesting
I was surprised your post had no references to Joseph Tainter, unlike Eli Dourado https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2024/05/06/response-to-eli-dourado-on-collapse/
Well, the post summarizes a specific book and is not meant to give an overview of societal collapse in general. If you want that, look this post: https://existentialcrunch.substack.com/p/mapping-out-collapse-research There I also discuss Tainter. You will also find mentions of Tainter throughout my other writing on the blog.
Can anyone suggest a good public speaker on the subject of game theory?
https://youtu.be/ujsw_bSbD1I I find this video funny in context of, this is what happens if GlaDOS is successfully aligned before anything horrible happens.
Question people! How did the squat and deadlift kind of exercise got so popular, as opposed to traditional body-building, and why is it kinda linked to the Manosphere and Dissident Right?
To me squat and deadlift are the strength of a pack mule, I would not define strength that way, I would define strength as throwing a punch, or historically a spear, so arms and shoulders. Not incidentally, that is how a man looks good, not by having a huge ass and thighs.
Do the squat and deadlift exercises have a psychological benefit? Or they are just good at keep fat away?
If you deadlift and squat instead of chiseling your triceps on the cable and talking about your arm circumference like a traditional body-builder (in the beach boy sense of traditional body-builder, not like people who actually compete) - why?
I am off to the gym in 10 minutes, today it is leg press machine, stomach machine, chest press machine and triceps machine. Tomorrow will be back and bicep and stomach again. These deliver the looks and the health. These deliver strength in the sense of looking like a boxer who hits hard. These do not deliver strength in the sense of carrying loads like a pack mule -but why should I ever need that kind of strength?
My theory, off the cuff and not to be taken seriously:
they're easily quantifiable,
form is easy to evaluate since the Big Three lifts are the standard for strongman competition,
they have a large systemic effect since they involve the comparatively huge muscles of the lower body and with a barbell touch like 2/3 of muscle groups by count, so they make you feel good,
the learning curve is very rewarding early on even for a weak lifter because there's significant gains available from pure form improvement,
due to all of these there's cargo culting about how they're essential components of a serious beginner routine, or at least unavoidable.
Due to all of the above, advancement and correctness are legible to autism-spec people who don't have a social network to get feedback or reinforcement on correctness or, uh, I guess virtue or status-increase-from-an-action of their work in the gym.
The manosphere association is also multifactorial, and I think falls out of them being starter moves and the direction of the sum of theses of the manosphere being that the world is built wrong for you, but if you work hard on yourself you can get good enough to find happiness in it anyway, either by leveling up your sexual game, acquiring virtue by self-improvement in bodily health, or actualizing your own ambition.
I can't speak for where the broader right-wing association with strength training came from, or why combat sports don't seem to have grown an association with that faction.
But advancement and correctness are also legible on the leg press machine, the lat pull down machine etc.
Also you could sign up at a boxing gym and actually be a boxer who hits hard! Go is always better than show
> If you deadlift and squat instead of chiseling your triceps on the cable and talking about your arm circumference like a traditional body-builder (in the beach boy sense of traditional body-builder, not like people who actually compete) - why?
1. Only squats and deadlifts will increase your bone density, which is important and one of the primary benefits of resistance exercise.
2. Deadlifts in particular are a great proxy for "functional strength," ie. the strength you use to lift a piece of furniture, or whisk your SO off their feet, or grab a big luggage and run up or down some stairs. It's the type of strength that actually impresses on people "oh, that guy is strong."
3. You can absolutely get shredded doing squats and deadlifts - back when I was competing, I was so shredded people at pool parties of both genders would come up and ask to get pictures with me, and I never did any "cosmetic" lifts, just lots of Big 5.
you mean you had arms without doing triceps extensions, really?
Unless you live a very interesting life, you need to carry heavy loads far more often than you need to throw punches. Think grocery shopping, moving furniture, that sort of thing.
Also, in a lot of martial arts, you generate power for strikes from the whole chain of the body and not just your arms.
I'm new to weightlifting, and I'm all about the squats and deadlifts. It's because my hobby is a the sport of powerlifting, which focuses on maxing out big compound lifts- squat, bench, and deadlift are the big three. It's not bodybuilding. It's more about seeing number go up than about getting shredded.
UK perspective and I wouldn't know about the vaguely political stuff. I'd say both deadlifts and esp squats seems to be a little more common now than in the gyms of, say, 25 years ago. I'd guess this is more people taking online advice, either in silly places or from people who know what they are talking about.
More importantly, I have no doubt at all that there are significant numbers of people doing these exercises who absolutely shouldn't be. Form is terrible and they are storing up problems.
I lift to increase muscle so I get general health benefits, including less pressure on joints as I age. Also building muscle anywhere increases metabolism.
I believe there is some gym rat cachet to barbell squats because they look (and probably are) dangerous but I stick to dumbbells.
I have the same mentality, just with machines, as they guide me and thus require less attention. Impossible to lose form on a leg press. This also means I can go heavier than I could if there would be a chance of say falling over.
Just because they aren't visible, doesn't mean your back muscles aren't important. If your limb muscles are massive but your back is weak, you will injure your back a lot.
Also, women definitely check out your ass.
Here's a guess: On 4chan /fit/ there was a big (meme?) culture around squatting and deadlifting circa 2010. A lot of it evolved from ridiculing a book called "Starting Strength" by a guy named Rippetoe. And as it was 4chan, the memeing also tied in gay-bashing, misogyny, inceldom, etc
I have no idea what population size this is (dozens? thousands?), but if you were a teenage boy at that time (like i was) on that message board, you're now an adult man who may have internalized some manosphere/redpill ideas from that ecosystem.
I was there, Gandalf, 3500 years ago when cries of "squats and oats" echoed through the halls of /fit/.
/Fit/ was my fav board so I spent a lot of time there. I do not have the impression there was red pill/manosphere stuff there then. I remember the over the top sexism (and every other -ism), but it wasn't bitter and more like a lot of teenage boys trying to sound menacing. The overall vibe was one of "we're all gonna make it" with zyzz at the head.
I figured out my life, partly thanks to the fitness knowledge I gained from /fit/, and moved on so I didn't see the evolution of what happened and not super interested in how the place looks now. But back then it was a weird, fun place, maybe a little like Bushwick in NYC--dirty and you might get stabbed or a wall might fall on you, and there were quite a few creeps, but most people were really out doing themselves making funny or useful memes.
Why should you ever need any kind of strength? If you're not carrying a deer down a mountain, why even get out of your chair?
Correct, I do not get out of the chair except for the gym i.e. the machines, and I do that because if I stay 100% in the chair all the time I feel 30 years older than I am.
Especially for women it's pretty important for bone health
What's gone so badly wrong in your life that you're not carrying a deer down a mountain?
It's not my fault, the sun was in my eyes. And the rain. And the snow.
I'm pretty sure I scared it though, and that's half the battle.
Being able to throw a punch might be useful.
I've spent a lot more time moving furniture or lifting bags of rice than I have throwing punches.
Well duh. Punches are supposed to be quick.
Lol!
> is the best natural way to increase testosterone production
Thanks, this is exactly what I expected when I wrote that there might be a psychological benefit! I remember the very early years of PUA, when it was not so toxic yet, and thus a mainstreamish media had an interview with Roosh, the title was something like "sex tourist discovers weight lifting" and there was a pic of Roosh squatting heavy.
Now I already figured that he does not do it because women like muscular thighs or anything, but rather it somehow makes him feel manlier, confident or something like this. Generally machine based, upper body focus body-building makes me feel manlier, too, but perhaps this sort of stuff works more in that direction.
I've just come back from a wedding, and during the service I noticed they've changed the lyrics of the hymns from the versions I know. They weren't random variations, every single change was made to eliminate "man", "men", "son", etc in favour of a gender-neutral alternative. I am unastounded to notice this.
What did surprise me was that apparently any references to Christ or Jesus also merited removal.
I am really curious about the subjective experience of the decision-maker here. I will assume this person still calls themselves a Christian. What does the progression feel like, as one ideology totally replaces another, without your even noticing the change?
All I can say is that Protestants have a long history of changing things around a lot, so this does not surprise me at all. A Catholic or Orthodox wedding probably sticks to the traditions (rules, even).
Now removing Christ from a Christian ceremony is surprising, Protestant change-orientedness is really not supposed to go that far... at that point why even sing hymns? Our wedding intro was the Star Wars Imperial March, and everybody was laughing their butts off. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsMWVW4xtwI&list=RDvsMWVW4xtwI&start_radio=1
You might read Anthony Esolen on what they did to hymns. He is atrociously funny but also angry.
>They weren't random variations, every single change was made to eliminate "man", "men", "son", etc in favour of a gender-neutral alternative.
In many but not all cases, this may be truer to the original meaning. "Man" has both a gemder-neutral and a gendered sense, with the former dominant in the distant past, with a separate word, "were" (as in "weregeld" and "werewolf") specifically meaning adult male human. The gendered sense of "man" is now strongly dominant and newer gemder-neutral turns of phrase have arisen to replace the gemder-neutral sense of the word.
specifically it was wereman for men and wyfman for women (cognate to wife)
Makes sense. Old-time English was probably highly similar to German, which has two words, der Mann for men, and "man" as a generic subject, similar to "one" in English, "one does not simply walk into Mordor" "man wird nicht einfach in Mordor reinspazieren"
I don't generally get as far as asking that - I invariably get stuck on "why do so many people who do not otherwise believe in Christianity specifically want a religious wedding service in a Christian church?"
Not everyone "gets" religion in a real sense, whether conservative or liberal. A lot don't even consider it.
It's hard to explain. Fundamentalists kind of come close with silly analogies. A lot of people really do think they are cars because they are in a garage: if you are in a church or are trained as a pastor you are one; but the content just bounces off.
not in a "thoughtful heretic" way, they just live according to the values of their culture and religion acts as sort of a part of that.
the situationists use "recuperate"'as how capitalism transforms subcultures to reflect its values, but culture in general can recuperate religion in similar ways.
Unitarians have been doing that for at least 3 decades now.
Best description of Unitarian beliefs: There's one God at most.
I think you got it backwards. There's one God at minimum. ;-)
People should spend more time with anthropology as a subject. They should know something about human intuitions about continuity with the past, rituals, and sacred art or objects to know that maintaining the original forms is part of the social magic that enables a true feeling of transcendence.
Of course, the people the vote for these kinds of changes are the first to tell you that anthropology is strictly white man colonialism or something.
I can never get over the change I saw to Hark the Herald Angels Sing: "born to raise the sons of earth" to "born to raise us from the earth" (or something like that). Removing poetry from an artwork should be a crime, let alone when you don't bother even trying to come up with a vaguely poetic replacement. (I think they also changed "pleased as man with man to dwell" to something completely banal).
And worst of all, it's not like there aren't *real* problems in Christianity to maybe have a look at. (See my reply to Rob). The hills people choose to die on are enough to make me welcome the AI/nuclear/climate/whatever-the-latest-is apocalypse because I've utterly lost faith in humanity.
I'm not surprised by the "man" and "son" stuff - my old Reconstructionist synagogue tacked on a prayer about the Matriarchs to the traditional prayer about the Patriarchs way back in the 1990s.
I'm pretty shocked that they managed to remove Jesus, though. What exactly were these hymns? What did they do with the part where Jesus was supposed to appear? "Praise Be To Somebody, But We're Not Sure Who"?
"The nice man is risen today
A-a-a-a-a-leluia.
Our triumphant holy day
A-a-a-a-a-leluia.
Raise your joy and triumph high
A-a-a-a-a-leluia.
Sing ye heavens and earth reply.
A-a-a-a-a-leluia."
"Nice man" ???
Did they get a Hindu to revise?
Pretty much. For example the "Christ of my own heart" at the end of Be Thou My Vision became something something "all our dear hearts".
Unfortunately I didn't trouble to remember the replacement lyrics, because I was too busy judging the female vicar. My sexist objection to her mere existence aside: the one rule at a wedding is Do Not Upstage The Bride. Someone should have had a quiet word with her about how the bride might feel to walk in and find another woman in a brilliant white gown already standing there at the altar.
Your example in Be Thou My Vision might just be general variation in the lyrics, rather than a specific change. I can find various versions of the hymn online, and I have always sung "heart of my own heart" where I imagine you have "Christ of my own heart".
For example I can see the version on https://hymnary.org/hymn/HDDW2024/268 has "heart of my heart" (presumably the 'own' has been erroneously omitted).
The above seems to have "I thy dear child" rather than "I thy true son", if I search for a version that has stayed with the gendered language there I can find https://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/hymn-lyrics/be_thou_my_vision_o_lord_of_my_heart.htm , which still doesn't have a "Christ of my own heart".
Neither of those two sources matches exactly what my (C of E) church sings, so there are definitely at least a few variants of this hymn out there.
Was this a wedding at a church?
If so, I’d guess it’s a liberal mainline church. I’d also guess that they are hemorrhaging members and will cease to exist in short order.
I don't know but the old lady volunteer person and I defiantly sung the correct lyrics at the top of our voices from the back.
If this was a liberal mainline church (PC[USA], ELCA, UMC, Episcopalian, etc) I've been under the impression that the clergy have been running to the theological "left" for some time, and the death or departure of more-traditionally minded congregants has enabled these kind of changes. In this sense, the decision maker is staying true to what his/her theology says.
I left the PC[USA] after a bunch of changes like this. God as a woman I can maybe tolerate. Once you start wavering on salvation only through Christ, the church has left the building IMO.
Sorry for the aggressive reply, but from my perspective you just said that pointless political signalling which helps no one (and arguably makes a mockery of coherent theology[1]) you can tolerate, but questioning a doctrine (all non-believers will burn in hell[2]) that causes unimaginable psychological suffering and has a strong claim to being the most evil idea that has ever been formulated, you can't.
The hills people will choose to die on, among all the possible such hills, disturb me more than I can describe.
([1] God as a man is obviously metaphysically incoherent if taken literally, but it's easy to interpret as a metaphor. Once you change God to a woman it's much harder to see as intended metaphor, since why would someone make the change if they think it's just metaphorical? It suggests they either view God as a physical being, or are trying to hijack theology to propogate gender ideology.)
([2] or even "merely" permanently destroyed, which compared to hell looks wonderfully humane, but what does it say about Christianity when something that's several thousand times worse than the Holocaust is the humane alternative?)
I don't understand your point. Even non-Christian sources like Tacitus or Flavius describe Jesus as clearly male. It is more or less a historic fact that a man with a similar name was preaching there and got crucified. The faith-based and likely metaphorical aspect is that that man was also god.
"God as a man is obviously metaphysically incoherent if taken literally, but it's easy to interpret as a metaphor."
Okay, standard Catholic reply that I remember from my teenage years:
God is a spirit, which means neither or both male/female. God does not have a gender as such.
https://www.catholic.com/qa/does-god-have-a-body-like-ours
*But* why then do we call God our Father? Well, because Jesus taught us to refer to our Father in Heaven, not our Mother or our non-binary parent.
https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/catechism/index.cfm?recnum=591
I guess the answer to why (non-theologically) that I think of is that Jesus was begotten of God and Mary (and there was no technology to have a child any other way than male/female pairings back then)
Does this mean Jesus said something that isn't true? Or maybe that it makes emotional sense but not literal sense?
Throughout human history and across all cultures, but particularly first century Judea, mothers and fathers have different roles. Fathers strong, protective, authoritative, mothers are soft, nurturing, etc. Jesus is telling us that we should consider our relationship with God to be fatherish rather than motherish.
I can think of other religions with a father-god (Zeus, Odin) but few with a mother-god. Possibly because fathers are expected to be a bit distant whereas mothers aren't. Sometimes the Earth itself is conceptualised as a mother.
This seems to be the correct answer. Even in my childhood, the basic parental setup was that mothers do not punish children, they threaten misbehaving children of telling it to their fathers, who will then administer punishment.
Thus a fatherly god is strict, punishing, tough love.
A motherly god would rather provide free food and heal the sick. Although thinking of it it is interesting Jesus said to have done exactly that! Jesus was very non-manly by the standards of the era, generally forgiving instead of judgemental, caregiving and so on. The only warrior-like act chasing out the money changers etc. actually strange.
Salvation solely through Jesus is *the* central truth claim of Christianity. I don't see any way around that.
There's a saying among several denominations: "In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty." While I think changing God's pronouns is an eye-roll concession to changing social norms, I'm willing to say it falls into a non-essential category.
I feel like solely comes with an asterisk there; the bible does lay out other ways for the descendants of Abraham to be forgiven of their sins. I agree that it's a mushier point that will get some debate though.
> Salvation solely through Jesus is the central truth claim of Christianity.
No, Christ is the Messiah, and he's gonna come back, bring on the end-times, and whup the collective asses of anyone who doesn't accept his love. That is the central truth of Christianity. 2 Thess 2:8 comes immediately to mind.
Plenty of universalist Christians would disagree strongly with that. At least the ones who haven't been viciously bullied out of the mainstream church and pushed into using some term like "Jesusist" instead of "Christian" because of said bullying.
Again, the fact that pro-choice Christians and pro-transitioning-toddlers Christians seem more tolerated than universalist Christians (at least, while I've seen hatred for the former from mainstream evangelicals, it's absolutely dwarfed by the hatred I've seen for the latter) makes me lose faith in humanity.
(There's a possible motte-and-bailey around "salvation only through Christ", where it could mean that Christ's death saved everyone (or everyone except the absolute most evil and hard-hearted people), or it could mean that everyone who doesn't become a Christian in this life is damned. So wavering on the doctrine could mean saying that Christ wasn't actually metaphysically necessary, or that salvation isn't limited to those who believe in Christ in their lifetime. I suppose it's possible you meant the first, in which case my apologies for my irrelevant response, but based on my experience of these discussions my prior is at least 90% that you meant the second).
there aren't really a lot of universalist Christians in the sense you mean.
Universalism still means hell exists and Christ saved us from it, but extended to all and patiently waits till you receive it, if after death. There is still an act of the will to receive it, and possibly some afterlife where those who can't exist, but universalism is rare and idk modern proponents.
Universalism i think still believes sin is separation from God and there is punishment, but that in the end all will be well. Like it still believes in traditional ideas about free will or why jesus needed to be sacrificed.
peope dont like unitarian universalists, which are not christian at all: you can be atheist an be one.
christian universalism
though is a decent position, but its rarely argued: George Mac Donald's Lilith is where I encountered it, and its extremely poetic.
I'm kinda laughing here at "don't dare promulgate that tired old notion of Hell, that's fine to dump it - but what do you mean they changed the lyrics of a 19th century hymn? Heresy! Blasphemy!"
I do think the gender-neutral language stuff can go too far, but that has been happening from way back.
I'm surprised about the "dump any mentions of Jesus" but then a lot of liberal churches are 'welcoming' to the 'questioning' and maybe they feel that terms like "Jesus" are much too dogmatic for someone not even sure about this whole God thing in the first place. So make it that the songs are changed to be modern and anyone can sing along without having to make a doctrinal statement and everything is good now.
>I'm kinda laughing here at "don't dare promulgate that tired old notion of Hell, that's fine to dump it - but what do you mean they changed the lyrics of a 19th century hymn? Heresy! Blasphemy!"
I mean, do you laugh at the suggestion that actually slavery and torturous executions of petty thieves were horifically evil but historical love stories that were too "heteronormative" are...not? Do you laugh at the suggestion that serial rapist-murderers should be treated a fair bit harsher than kids who shoplifted a few candy bars? Because that's the level of moral equivalence we're talking about here.
I don't know if I want to know if you believe in hell. This is something that I try to forget about people, because the alternative is having to face up to the fact that a large number of my fellow citizens and neighbours are sadistic monsters to an unimaginable degree. Like, there's just no way someone with anything resembling a conscience, posessing even the tiniest shred of moral decency or empathy, could believe in that. Right??? I don't know how to interpret your casually dismissive response "kinda laughing" to this issue, but to be honest it greatly disturbs me.
Depends on the denomination, but I think it's a "one funeral at a time" thing. Most clergy seem to develop their basic ideas at seminary. Some move with the times or get mugged by reality - Pope Francis got more liberal over time and Benedict more conservative. But the laity are important too - hymns are often chosen by the music director who may have lived in the parish for decades while priests change every 5 years. Again this person will have got reform-pilled and remain fixed in their views for a while, however sudden and radical it seems when you’re visiting that parish.
The weird truth is they most certainly don't experience it as an ideological shift - they are discovering the true Christianity which empties itself as Christ did on the cross, it's the "rigid" people who want Jesus in the hymns who are the pharisees.
Edit: This article is an interesting take on ultra-reform Christianity. Money quote: "It is not Christian to be Christian"
Death of God Fifty Years On - First Things https://share.google/wcIaEJRUV9v0AjTy2
I know unsolicited parenting advice is hardly ever well-received. Nevertheless... do you think that distraction is the right approach when a child wants something they can't have? I think it's important to teach them to manage their emotions, even at that early an age, and to respect others.
Here's an example from the animal realm that captures the crucial distinction. My cats used to jump on my back with their claws out. (They weren't attacking, just treating me like a tree trunk.) When they did I yelled and immediately stood up and shook them off. The yell gave them an unpleasant start, and being shaken off immediately ended their fun. This unpleasant consequence quickly taught them not to jump on my back.
There's another thing they do that I also dislike: Their meowing for attention when I'm concentrating hard on some task on the computer. I don't mind the meowing in other situations. There is no way to teach them not to make a racket when I'm concentrating because they are not capable of recognizing when I'm concentrating. Also, meowing, while not involuntary, is a natural, deeply wired-in behavior they emit a much of the time. Since trying to teach them not to meow when I'm concentrating is impossible, I use distraction to keep them quiet. I give them food puzzles and other distractions.
When it comes to teaching kids to do or not to do something, there's the same principle at work. You can only teach them if they can grasp what the something is, and if they have enough self-monitoring capacity and self-control to refrain from doing the something. Scott's kids are too little to learn and follow the lesson that it is bad to yank things away from your sibling. If he sternly admonishes them or punishes them with a little time out, they will become more uneasy around toys, their sibling, and him, but they will not learn the particular lesson he wants to target.
For 1.5 year olds? Yes. Yes it is. If your kids are older now you may be projecting an ability to reason backwards... That is, my 3.5 year old can, at times, be reasoned with. My 1.5 year old just doesn't have the understanding necessary for that to be a meaningful conversation.
I think people underestimate how much even a one year old understands. But anyway, it's not about reasoning only, it's about learning behaviours. They certainly learn that if you give in every time they shout, they should keep shouting.
So what do you think of my cat example? (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-397/comment/151338000) Am I being too soft on my cats by giving up on teaching them not to make a racket when I'm concentrating? Am I teaching them that meowing when I'm concentrating gets them food puzzles with treats in them?
I don't know anything about cats. I wouldn't raise children the way I'd treat kittens.
Oh, come on! It's a thought experiment. You don't need to be highly familiar with cats to understand it. The relevant point is that cats cannot distinguish between me sitting in a chair relaxed and available and me sitting in a chair concentrating hard on a project. Feel free to substitute any mammal you like except maybe a very smart near-relative of our species like a chimp. The point is that there are a things you cannot teach a non-human mammal to do because it cannot recognize crucial features of the thing you want to teach. In this case, it can't distinguish between a sitting person who is concentrating and needs silence and one who is relaxed and does not object to some noise and attempts at interaction.
Ok right but this isn't applicable to children, for two reasons. First, kids understand more than you give them credit for. Second, what, you think kids hit a certain age, and suddenly you start reasoning with them? It's a gradual process, so you should begin reasoning right from the start. Otherwise, a) you yourself develop bad parenting habits you won't shake off, and b) you won't know when to start.
I'm sure he does not give in every time they shout. If he stops them from doing something dangerous, like standing on the edge of a table, he has to just put up with the yells of frustration. In my experience with very small toddlers you need to stop them from doing what they want to very often, certainly more than once an hour, out of safety considerations alone. If you didn't, they'd be falling off the back of the couch, mouthing plastic spoons they found on the ground outdoors, grabbing cactus plants, etc etc. multiple times per day. He's also tolerating excitement shouting, and frustration shouting at times when he can't figure out what it is the kid wants. So the kids are learning that sometimes shouting gets you want you want and sometimes it does not. That, by the way, is true at all ages, even in adult life, although of course the conditions under which it works and doesn't work follow very complex rules in adult life. I think they're getting the best approximation of the truth that's possible for such young beings.
Also, Scott probably tries to anticipate things that are going to lead to frustration yelling, and intervene before the yelling starts by making sure the kid who is about to be frustrated gets an alternative toy that distracts them. So the kid's experience in that situation is not that yelling gets them what they want but that life is fun and good and wonderful, fascinating things pop up all the time.
So the contingicies are nowhere near as simple as what you sketched in.
How did you go about this, and how well did it work? Always interested to hear tips.
In such examples, I would tell the child trying to snatch a toy from their sibling to stop it, and wait for their turn. I am not saying I wouldn't offer alternatives, but I'd have the discussion with them ('you shouldn't want something just because other people have it; you can't take things by force. Wait for your turn - and if you're bored, you can play with X/Y/Z in the meantime').
You expect a 1.5 year old toddler to understand phrases like "by force" and "if you're bored" and "wait your turn"? These kids, shown a book, point to each dog and say "dog." They are not even saying "doggie run" much less things things about dog experience -- "dog scared" or "dog bored." And they are really really far from using words to express some general principle, by saying something like "doggie should wait." No doubt they understand more than they can express, but not THAT much more.
First off, yes, I think they can understand the concept. But even if not, I think it's never to early to start parenting properly! Otherwise, you get into habits that stay even after the children have grown.
Have you considered the possibility that you just had very easy children? I have two, and they are worlds apart in terms of challenge. They just are that way.
I definitely have easy children. But I also think waaaay too many people hide behind the excuse of 'my child is difficult, they're just born this way'. Same way parents stick an iPad on their kids' laps as soon as they board a plane.
Having followed that advice, do you just ignore the now-screaming child, or attempt to keep talking to it in the hope of calming it down? When the child tries to get what it wants anyway, do you physically restrain it, or do you take the thing it wants away, do you shout at the child, or do you do something else?
Scott's kids are within a few days of mine, because I remember reading his announcement post while sitting in the mat ward. And while I know my child at this age can definitely understand and obey simple sentences like "go and give this to mummy", the finer distinctions of "is"-vs-"ought" inherent in "you shouldn't want something" aren't going to land anywhere yet.
Hah I can't quite remember how I handled the worst tantrums - must have blocked it from my memory. I won't lie, I wasn't the best at dealing with proper tantrums, but these were rare, in general my kids wouldn't scream just because they wanted something.
One thing that worked really well for us as parents were to trade places - e.g. if a child threw a tantrum in response to my intervention, my wife was better at calming them down, and vice versa.
But definitely, we wouldn't give in to screaming, and we would take things away if they were triggers for bad behaviour.
Another option is to set up the play space with some toys that are fun to play with together. My 1.5 year olds loved sitting in a circle with a small group and rolling one or more balls to each other.
Also games that everyone can play at once, like digging in a sand box or playing with a pile of duplos work pretty well. This scheme works best if the play space has fewer toys in it that are “extra special”.
Activities like joining forces to catch a parent, or attempt to wrestle a parent to the ground are great for building their team spirit and strategic thinking.
As they get get interested in developing particular skills, like stacking, you can turn this into a cooperative game in which the group is trying to stack a particular tall tower of pillows, and you might need help stabilizing it from different sides.
Oh, and before anyone asks “what happens if one child starts, knocking the tower over before it’s been built to everyone satisfaction?”
One way of dealing with this is to embrace how much fun it is to knock over towers and make it a group activity to build the tower as tall as possible and then when it’s your turn, you’re the one who gets to knock the tower over.
Jenny Zito (Bill Zito’s Mom)
I worry that there is some runaway process where:
· people of great mind and achievement thereby become famous and get a lot of internet attention, and they also discuss complex, sensitive, and explosive topics, and allow themselves to be vulnerable;
· they consequently become targets of sneer, mockery, and bullying,
· and then their personality sort of changes when they start to associate the sort of outgroup who disagrees with them with sneering bullies;
· and then we lose these people of achievement because they devote their life to fighting some form of outgroup according to their new threat model.
Maybe we as humanity deserve to lose them for not having much stronger norms against mocking genuine openness and vulnerability, but it kinda sucks.
Maybe said out group needs to be destroyed? Maybe such people of great mind and achievement have come to the important realisation that any group that tolerates and encourages mockery of the honest and vulnerable is not a group that should be part of a healthy society?
#istandwithjkrowling
I am reminded a bit of Richard Dawkins, who started out writing great books like The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype and wound up writing terrible books called things like No Really The Earth Isn't Flat You Fucking Idiots because he engaged with his dumbest critics rather than ignoring them.
Yes, I find this very wise.
Just recently I learned about a philosopher publicly criticizing another philosopher for publicly praising Dawkins's Selfish Gene, back at that time. And Dawkins engaged.
What for?
This criticizing philosopher had really crazy views, and would never ever be moved by an article exchange when she didn't even understand his book.
Yeah, Dawkins had two whole lives of being controversial. The second was when he devoted himself to arguing with creationists, the first was when he got attacked by leftists who fundamentally misunderstood what "The Selfish Gene" was about, perhaps confusing it with Ayn Rand's "The Virtue Of Selfishness".
I think that's a valid worry. Even without algorithms nudging us towards furious indignant exchanges, dialog between relative strangers online devolves very easily into a deep, furious feeling of being misunderstood, and a craving to counterattack.. We didn't evolve to discuss sensitive matters under these conditions, you know? For public intellectuals I think it's safer to write books and articles and do a podcast, as someone like Ezra Klein seems to mostly do, rather than engage directly via online forums.
part of life is knowing when not to be vulnerable, or cultivating the correct social distance between groups of people. if you fail at this, its you; there will always be enemies/outgroup when you make a statement, and you cannot bare your fuzzy tummy to anyone who walks by.
i don't know if the rise of autism makes this harder, or kids are raised by screens and generally managed too tightly to pick this up, but if you want to play football you will get tackled and lose games. You need to learn to process the negative parts and go beyond psychic pain or structure to minimize it.
I mean, yeah, on the one hand it's their failure to protect their epistemology. But on the other hand I think there are circumstances where doing the vulnerable thing is like being pro-social at your own expense, and when you have a large audience, this effect is stronger: you bring greater benefit at a greater expense. "This sucky situation you're not supposed to talk about happens, and people actually speak up about it now, including this famous and successful person. I thought I was the only one! Maybe I'll even discuss it with others when I see ten other people do so". It makes it less scary when you need to talk about something that wants you to be a silent victim; it becomes slightly harder to play the "nobody cares that you have this problem" routine. And in addition, I really do think that derision should be perceived as an unhealthier think than it currently is; it breaks communication and openness, and we badly need them. Rather: we badly need specifically the kind of communication that derision breaks.
I'm not familiar with who it is, but he might be doing it more to be understood or liked. If he is speaking truth to change the culture, he has to harden up and realize prophets get stones thrown at them.
Its not read as much these days, but Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War was formative for me because it showed both sides and didnt sugarcoat it. it turns out something as simple as refusing to sell chocolates for a fundraiser can cause outright hatred and violence as the price for disturbing the universe.
whoever he is has to keep it in mind. you cant make people be nicer.
Do you have Scott Aaronson in mind? Because in his case, the cause and effect are reversed, i.e. the ultimate source of his descent into genocidal madness is a deep-rooted persecution complex, not internet bullies or SneerClub (in fact, bullies just became a convenient excuse for him).
Initially I thought he meant Jordan Peterson, he started out as a basic righty telling young men to clean their rooms and got more and more unhinged.
Eh, in my opinion he's no worse than the Free Press, and not nearly as influential. But I'm kind of wishy-washy on the whole Israel thing, honestly. It makes people very angry to bring up, it doesn't divide cleanly into left and right so you can always start fights with it (a perfect scissor statement!), I don't have any special expertise to bear on the situation, and being half Jewish and having frankly right-wing and sadistic natural leanings I don't think my natural inclinations are going to add anything useful.
My opinion of people like Jordan Peterson is that they are frauds, preying on ignorance. "clean your room" is bog-standard Behavioural Activation Therapy, yet he presented it as some genius idea he invented. This generated him a credibility that led to that crowd believing him anything.
Peterson's advice was actually clean your room and stand up straight.
I believe a lot of what got him his fandom is that he liked young men and wished them well, while feminists didn't.
Did he say that? I'm actually not that familiar with the guy, but I see his name more than Aaronson's. (Maybe Aaronson's name is very well known in computing--lot of techies here!)
The cognitive-behavioral people redid Stoicism for the 20th century, but I guess they gave credit.
Yeah, the thing with Israel is that both Netanyahu and Hamas are f**king evil and Palestinian children are paying the ultimate price
There are a hundred of these civil wars around the world. Why is Israel such a big deal?
Which of these other civil wars have involved ~50,000 civilians being directly killed by a Western-aligned governmental force in two years?
Because we see Israel as a Western nation, and they are certain trying to be part of that club in other questions (say allowing Pride parades).
Yeah that’s a great question. Partly it’s because the USA is a big deal and Israel low key wields a lot of political power there. Mossad and CIA are heavily intertwined. So I think people have the intuition, which is largely correct, that USA/Israel military and intelligence agencies have been responsible for a lot of bad things in the world over the past decades (in Middle East and elsewhere) and have been getting away with it due to their superior military and cultural influence. For example Syrian civil war had many more casualties than Gaza, and it was sponsored by the USA who were literally funding and arming Al Qaeda to try and topple Assad.
Unfortunately some of these people project their frustrations onto the Palestinians, who mostly just want to live in peace like any other group of people, and end up supporting Hamas (yay! Resistance!) who are the worst type of blood-and-soil nationalists and have done more harm to the Palestinian aspiration for a free state than Netanyahu could ever dream of. Their ideology is basically Nazism - global caliphate, superior race, armed struggle, Lebensraum for the Islamic people, kill the Jews.
Ahmed Fouad Alkhaitib is the clearest thinker and speaker on this conflict I’ve found - check him out on Twitter/X. He is a Palestinian peace activist. Hopefully he will be President of a free Palestinian state some day.
> he started out as a basic righty telling young men to clean their rooms and got more and more unhinged
Actually he started out as a basic lefty, but then said one thing that the left disagreed with.
I don't know if I can ask anyone to do anything, I'm not the moderator, just the author of the comment, but I think it's best if we don't discuss any specific people here. It's culture-warish (so has a chance to derail discussion) and sorta off-topic (at least, I'd like to discuss the general phenomenon, not the stance of particular people). Also, I'd love to try to approach people with humanity, not discarding anyone, discarding seems like the opposite of what I'm trying to do: to understand, restore the severed communication, to bridge the gap... At any rate, I think it's best to go without personalities now.
Fair enough, Vadim. I posted this example because I feel the description of the process you give in the parent comment is too abstract and simplistic, in fact simplistic enough to be misleading. Behind virtually every case of "someone kind who was radicalized by exposure to internet bullies" is a more complex story (that often paints the person in worse light). The case of SA is one such example - at first glance he fits your general description and thus would invite sympathy, yet in fact the opposite is true (but you need to dig a bit deeper).
I initially assumed that V was referring to SG's recent criticism of SA's politeness policy and labeling that criticism as bullying. But that's fairly weak tea, and I dismissed it.
Is this a reference to who I think it is, whose responses have been...not optimized to the current situation?
It has indeed been inspired by said person, who has, in my perception, always been an epitome of kindness and humanity. But I thought it best not to name them: firstly, out of respect and not to turn this comment section into an off-topic discussion of them, and secondly, I have other examples in mind, as well.
Can you explain why do you think a genocide apologist should command respect? Hard to swallow pill: the same person can be an epitome of kindness and humanity in one context and, when triggered, advocate wholesale slaughter in another.
OK. Now I'm really curious. Who's the genocidal apologist? And which genocide are they whitewashing? There have been so many genocides in the 20th Century (and a few in the 21st century) that I could think of dozens of people who'd fit this bill.
Okay, *one* good reason was to last more than several hours without turning this into a discussion of the specific culture war which the discussion of *any* specific example of the phenomenon in post may bring.
If you're too fearful of controversy, then why make this argument in the first place? And why should we be believe you if you can't support your claim with examples? If you think of yourself as a rationalist, you should be able to support your argument with examples. And Truth with a capital T should win out over petty prejudices.
Politics is the mind killer, yadda yadda. Also I'm what's technically known in the medical science as a scaredy cat.
Speaking as a traumatized SSC subreddit poster, the world is a better place without SneerClub.
(Apologies if this is too online/niche of a reference.)
I read it regularly as a reminder not to be too enamored of rationalism (or any other ideology).
I still think I'd rather have the ACX commentariat beside my side, at work, as friends, or God forbid in a foxhole. You guys might get shot first, but Sneer Club seems like the sort to push you into oncoming fire.
> I read it regularly as a reminder not to be too enamored of rationalism (or any other ideology)
A better version of Sneerclub might be worth reading for that very reason, but the actual Sneerclub that exists is a phenomenon entirely of one ideology; specifically it's a bunch of leftists who hate Rationalism because it's not leftism.
I agree, but there aren't a lot of 'red teams' to read out there.
By the way, is there really much rationalism left in the commentariat? It's not like we discuss or apply techniques from the sequences, Bayesianism or whatever, isn't the commentariat at this point just a self-selected group of nice (and not-so-nice) like-minded people talking about diverse (and not-so-diverse) things?
At least no one is pulling https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ - that I always found super annoying, and Bayesianism kills that, because the so-called logical fallacies are for Bayesians simply weak evidences.
Please do not include me with the like-minded. But at the risk of becoming a figure of irony, I agree with you.
I came here for evidence-based arguments, but they seem few and far between.
I've heard the meetups described as a 'right-of-center nerd drinking club'.
And, you know, I'm cool with that.
I've been to a meetup where Scott also was, in Paris. He walked past me, I said hi (even though I don't know him), and he gave me this look like "who the hell is this???", awkwardly waved his hand, and resumed his way :)
The values of the meetup seemed that the people assembled were sufficiently diverse and tolerant of strange ideas as to bring interesting shit into each other's lives. Still, the actual rationalism seems like a nice thing to have had. And, like, Scott's contributions in the form of introducing useful concept handles like "motte and bailey" have also been very nice! Other than that, for a no-labels teetotaler, assembling by political views to drink feels purposeless somehow...
I'm sure they have other options, I was just referring to the one I knew. I'm not going to be too specific.
I also worry about this.
Are you worried about this happening to you, or do you think you're too in touch with reality / had too much exposure to nasty people saying nasty things about you on the internet to be in the high-risk group?
Do you have any ideas about preventing this from happening to you, personally? Other than making the world a gentler place, that is?
(As for me: I hope to not become famous, and I don't consume twitter for the same reasons I don't consume heroine, which I hope protects me somewhat. Otherwise, here's what's been helpful for me personally when I'm bitter and desperate: creating the things that I want to create; and focusing on things of beauty, as well as telling others about them. Maybe I should ask someone that in case I ever become a radicalized crackpot, they should send me one poem a day.)
The anniversary of the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan has given rise to a lot of debate. I did a podcast with Gary Bass on one of the things that happened next, namely the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. Gary is the writer of Judgement at Tokyo which I can’t recommend enough.
As you all know by now the podcast is called Subject to Change (with Russell Hogg) and you should all subscribe. It’s free and advertisement free!
As with the better known Nuremberg trials the tribunal sought to prosecute as a war crime not just the usual atrocities but also the waging of a war of aggression. This was a brand new idea and caused all sorts of problems and led to the massive 1,000+ page dissenting judgement from Judge Radhabinod Pal. His view was that fighting wars had never been a crime and that the Allies were just making it up. (He didn’t deny that the committing of atrocities could be war crimes).
Anyway here are a few things I learned on the podcast:
- Unlike Germany where the government policy was basically whatever Hitler said, Japan had a genuine cabinet government albeit heavily dominated by the military.
- The decision was made to prosecute all members of the cabinet in place at the time of Pearl Harbor as class A war criminals.
- This was particularly unfair on Shigenori Tōgō who had argued in favour of accepting American demands and against the attack on Pearl Harbor.
- This wasn’t polite demurral on his part. He pretty much had toe to toe shouting matches with the military. And this at a time when resisting the military regularly led to your assassination.
- Anyway much good it did him. Partly because the Japanese had destroyed all the records that the American bombings hadn’t already incinerated he was convicted and died in prison.
- More fortunate was Nobosuke Kishi. He was also part of the Pearl Harbor cabinet. But the trials were split in two and he was scheduled for part 2. Part 1 took so long they gave up on part 2 and let them go.
- Nobosuke Kishi ends up as prime minister as does his more famous grandson Abe Shinzo. Abe was a nationalist and very much regarded the Tokyo tribunal as victors justice and tried and failed to get Japan’s constitution changed to allow it to have armed forces (and not just heavily armed self defence forces!)
- One of the atrocities the Japanese were accused of was the incident at the island of Chichijima. Eight airmen were shot down, captured, executed and then partially eaten. A ninth was floating towards Chichijima in his life raft but was picked up by an American submarine.
- At the time he wasn’t anyone special but his name was George Herbert Walker Bush, later to become president of the United States.
- Many years later Bush attended Emperor Hirohito’s funeral and tactfully said something to the effect of how tremendously moved he was by all the pageantry.
- Judge Pal’s dissenting judgement was and still is much appreciated among the nationalists in Japan. Part of his argument was based on the racism that the Japanese had faced in trying to become part of the community of first rank nations. That made the quote he used to close his judgement slightly unfortunate. Well, not the quote itself but the person who said it - the white supremacist from the Civil War, Jefferson Davis:
When Time shall have softened passion and prejudice,
when Reason shall have stripped the mask from misrepresentation,
then Justice, holding evenly her scales, will require
much of past censure and praise to change places.
Anyway that’s just a few bits. Here is the real thing. And Gary Bass’s book is terrific!
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/subject-to-change/id1436447503?i=1000722503573
>His view was that fighting wars had never been a crime and that the Allies were just making it up
Note that one chapter of Profiles in Courage is dedicated to Robert Taft's advocacy of that position, which, the book argues, cost him the 1948 Republican presidential nomination.
It is my understanding that the idea of war crimes and the tribunals came from Stalin, and was a tool he was planning to use to eliminate "the officer class" altogether. Evidently, Truman was less keen on the idea than FDR, and so the trials were significantly narrowed, and the use of the death penalty was significantly reduced. This was the first time in history that the idea of "war crimes" was introduced. Before that, defeated enemies were eliminated just because they were defeated enemies, and no legal fig leaf was required.
> the idea of war crimes and the tribunals came from Stalin
> This was the first time in history that the idea of "war crimes" was introduced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hague_Conventions_of_1899_and_1907
Well I don’t disagree at all that the military dominated the government nor that everyone (even the emperor) was at risk of assassination if he stood up to them. (Note the attempted coup and assassinations immediately after the decision to surrender!)
But it was genuine constitutional government in a way Hitler’s wasn’t. And there was real debate not least at the time of the decision to attack Pearl Harbor and at the time of deciding whether to surrender and on what terms. And Shigenori Tōgō did stand up to the military in cabinet and at great personal risk.
And Togo failed, because the Japanese military did whatever they wanted and didn't listen to civilians or the Emperor or anyone else. (Despite constantly proclaiming their loyalty to the Emperor.) The army and navy even worked against each other because no one had control of both. The army did whatever they thought was best for the army and the navy did whatever they thought was best for the navy.
>as a war crime not just the usual atrocities but also the waging of a war of aggression. This was a brand new idea
Um https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kellogg%E2%80%93Briand_Pact 1928 already outlawed aggressive war, what it did not do is to determine individual criminal liability. So the idea was about half-new.
I admit it was still on sketchy legal grounds - jumping from the concept of a state breaking a treaty i.e. international law to individual criminal liability. Basically the people who started to those wars could not possibly know they could be prosecuted for it. This is in my book illegal, and was a classic case of might makes right. Given that the entire purpose of laws is to prevent violence, they generally break down near truly large-scale violence, such as world wars.
>Japan had a genuine cabinet government
Um look up all the assassinations of the era. Every politician who did not do what the hyper-nationalistic secret societies of officers wanted, got assassinated by them. This was not a genuine government in my book.
An idea for sf world building: sending probes from a simulation to the host world. This would be like a submarine (or a space ship) - everything you sense would be through devices but you could experience the host world.
This could lead to complex plays like sending submarines across two simulation boundaries. From two parallel simulations of from a double simulation to the real host.
Further it could lead to ideas about infinite simulation stacks. Or about what is even a simulation. If you can have peripheral device controlled from the simulation- then you can use it to manipulate the simulation substrate. Then what is really the boundary between the simulation and the host?
I have also a not well formed intuition about our senses and muscles being such peripherals of our brains. Does that make our world the host world?
I also just posted this on twitter: https://x.com/zby/status/1962436693476208941?s=46&t=lpe42kDwchPcrra0nzP53g
I have been playing with the idea of hacking the source code of the simulation from inside. I was going to do a short story, but it is metastasizing into a novel. I guess it will have to wait until the novel I am working on now is complete...
You might be interested specifically in this: https://gregegan.net/MISC/CRYSTAL/Crystal.html - although in this case the initial probes are made available to the inhabitants of the simulation.
Reminds me of William Gibson's Jackpot books (except the peripherals were used for parallel universe time travel)
Before Gibson, there was Zelazny and "Home is the Hangman".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Name_Is_Legion_(short_story_collection)
""Home Is the Hangman": A sentient space-exploration robot, lost years before, has apparently returned to Earth. One of its original designers has died under suspicious circumstances. Has the Hangman returned to kill its creators? The hero must find the Hangman and stop it, and time is running out. This story won the 1976 Hugo Award for Best Novella."
Yeah - I should have asked AI - apparently there are quite a few elaborations on this theme, although not everything fits - the first one it found is kind of different with parallel timelines you don't have all the complexity about host/simulation and controlling actuators.
----
Yep—there’s a rich vein of SF that hits your “sim-pilots + cross-layer probes + stack boundaries” idea. Here’s a tight, curated map with the closest matches first:
### Closest match (teleoperated bodies across layers)
* **William Gibson — *The Peripheral***: people in one timeline “drive” synthetic bodies called *peripherals* in another timeline via a quantum link; it’s basically cross-layer telepresence with gatekeepers and bandwidth politics. The TV adaptation spells it out: Flynne is “piloting a robot (Peripheral) via quantum tunneling” into a future London “stub.” ([Wikipedia][1])
### Nested sims & stack awareness
* **Daniel F. Galouye — *Simulacron-3*** (a.k.a. *Counterfeit World*): early, very on-point tale of a simulated city whose denizens (and their creators) confront the fact of layered realities; directly inspired *The Thirteenth Floor*. ([Wikipedia][2])
* **Greg Egan — *Permutation City***: uploaded minds build their own physics and effectively decouple from the “host,” pushing the idea that substrate control can move *up* the stack. ([Wikipedia][3])
* **Iain M. Banks — *Surface Detail***: societies wage a “War in Heaven” over simulated afterlives (Hells), with actors moving strategies between the real and virtual theaters. ([Wikipedia][4], [WIRED][5])
### Writing to (and hacking) the substrate
* **Greg Egan — “Luminous”** and **“Dark Integers”**: mathematicians discover parts of math/physics are *computationally contingent* and use proofs like exploits to alter reality—practically a manual for “peripherals that write to the substrate.” ([Wikipedia][6])
### Sim agents controlling host-world devices (your “peripherals” idea, literally)
* **Black Mirror — “White Christmas”**: a copied consciousness (“cookie”) is enslaved to run a smart home—i.e., a sim mind operating host-layer sensors/actuators under harsh time dilation. ([Wikipedia][7])
* **Caprica**: a virtual avatar (Zoe-A) is instantiated into a robot chassis; the show treats the jump from sim to host as an engineering and political problem. ([WIRED][8], [Wikipedia][9])
### Telepresence/peripheral craft (great for your “sim-submarine” feel, even when not full sims)
* **John Scalzi — *Lock In***: “threeps” (teleoperated bodies) with all the social/legal infrastructure around who gets to drive what, and how. Useful for your protocol/port-authority worldbuilding. ([Wikipedia][10])
* **Martha Wells — *Murderbot Diaries***: relentless, practical telepresence (bots, cameras, drones) with bandwidth/latency/security constraints that feel exactly like piloting a hull across a noisy boundary. ([Wikipedia][11])
### Boundary-blur aesthetics (the vibe of layers collapsing)
* **Serial Experiments Lain**: reality and the network interpenetrate; less about robots, more about what counts as the “host of the moment.” Great mood/reference text for your metaphysics. ([Wikipedia][12])
If you want, I can spin this into a mini-syllabus with the **specific chapters/episodes** that best illustrate: (1) bandwidth/latency limits, (2) actuation budgets and vetoes, and (3) stack-aware politics (ports, tariffs, “cut rights”).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral_%28TV_series%29 "The Peripheral (TV series) - Wikipedia"
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacron-3?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Simulacron-3"
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Permutation City"
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Detail?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Surface Detail"
[5]: https://www.wired.com/2010/10/iain-banks?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Sci-Fi Writer Iain Banks Talks Surface Detail's Hell, Creationist Heresy"
[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminous_%28book%29?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Luminous (book)"
[7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Christmas_%28Black_Mirror%29?utm_source=chatgpt.com "White Christmas (Black Mirror)"
[8]: https://www.wired.com/2010/01/alessandra-torresani?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Alessandra Torresani Gets Inside Caprica's Prime Cylon"
[9]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caprica?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Caprica"
[10]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_In?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Lock In"
[11]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Murderbot_Diaries?utm_source=chatgpt.com "The Murderbot Diaries"
[12]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Experiments_Lain?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Serial Experiments Lain"
Neal Stephenson's Fall, or Dodge in Hell plays in this space a bunch, especially with a late implication that (spoiler warning) the recurring character across several Stephenson books from widely different time periods Enoch Root is in some way a visitor from a higher layer of reality.