So there's a delusional take you see on twitter Etc. All the time. From both sides of almost any issue but especially anything related to Russia, elections, Etc. You see people who respond to normal criticism or an abundance of criticism (usually relatively earned by how bad their takes are) accusing their detractors or those who disagree of being bots or astroturfed Putin or Clinton agents... The implied premise being that only lumps of code or Chinese sweatshop workers employed by bad faith actors could hold views that disagree with the complainer. That only bots or paid shills could oppose Ukraine, or support Clinton over Bernie, or Biden over Trump... Etc.
I used to dismiss these complaints... but now I feel I might owe a general apology.
.
I've noticed since TheMotte moved to its new Site that the Quality of a lot of Comments are just off. Not that the takes are bad or low quality or have odd opinions But that they're Bizarrely and Unnervingly detached from even the barest context of the discussion itself. Stuff completely out of character for even a bad rulebreaking poster on the motte.
Short comments that don't engage with any arguments presented, or even engage with the context of the discussion... but that Immediately tangent off on some culture war point utterly unrelated to the discussion, and then not engaging wit any replies (often with a single external link)... I've seen weird shit on twitter so I've dug into a few of these accounts... and all of their comments are like this, short snipes that never engage even 1 or 2 comments deep with anyone who replies. but that are slowly wracking up a history on the platform...
And then today I was hit by a smoking gun, this Comment:
“The Ukraine conflict is one of the clearest examples of good vs. evil in the past century"
You said it! Look at how despicable these people are!
Video: Ukraine Soldiers Sing Praises Of WW II Era Nazi: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4H-yMmNh5Cs
And now NPR is just casually rehabilitating the Nazis: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/03/1084113728/a-closer-look-at-the-volunteers-who-are-signing-up-to-fight-the-russians
Now the links are to real pieces of media, The Jimmy Dore Show and NPR... both respectable enough... and there'd be little to suggest this was a bot trying to manipulate the discussion... except for one thing:
No one had said the quote he was replying too...
Indeed I know where he got the quote. It was from a discussion/long take weeks before in relation to Ukraine, and would not even have fit the discussion in that piece, since it was a meta-discussion about how figures discuss Ukraine relative to other wars. I'd quoted it back then as an example of something we'd think was delusional and completely detached from intellectual rigor if said about Iraq 1991 or WW1...
Indeed another comment making the opposite argument used the same quote and drew other quotes from the same two week old discussion... except arguing the opposite way (pro-Ukraine)... And likewise replied not at all to having it pointed out that nothing they quoted was at all mentioned in the actual thread or discussion that was being had.
.
This obviously killed the discussion in that thread... when half the thread becomes comments quoting things, points and arugments, that were never said, and the other half must become replies saying in effect WTF!?
Well you can't have a discussion any more. Any organic back and forth between actual mottizens was killed. And obviously none of these either schizos or bots responded to keep discussion going.
Now if this becomes the norm it will kill the space...
.
But its also really unnerved me with regards to the rest of the internet.
The "Dead Internet Theory" doesn't feel like a theory anymore. The Motte is an obscure space with discussion levels high enough you notice if an actor isn't actually thinking or engaging with what's been said... and 2 out of 15 comments in that thread were Fairly undeniably bots....
On a site that's only been up a few months.
What the hell must it be like on other forums? Newspaper comments? YouTube comments?
Hell 4Chan had to implement Capchas for every comment to avoid the problem.
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So I recently heard about this supplement called Nicotinamide Mononucleotide. It's heralded as this great medicine that reduces aging, and gets rid of many issues.
And I really want to believe it, but there's something snakeoil salesmany about it.
-
It's heralded as a magical cure with no downside
-
It resolves so many issues and problems with your body it's unreal
-
From brain to liver, to ankles and skin, it's all covered
It all sounds too good to be true to me. I don't think it has negative effects and it's actually malicious, but I think it's just a fad that's being pushed. I don't think it can do really bad harm, but I don't think there's any better effects than a tummy ache.
What do you think? Do you have experience with this supplement?
This is a fascinating video. At 7:00, Tom Rowsell (SurviveTheJive) reads out some excerpts of the Srimad Bhagvatam(an important hindu scripture) where many if not every single prophecy comes true. The higher values are replaced by lower ones. Ones only worth in society is based upon their level of affluence and sex, people have no loyalty to their own family, culture or values. The only thing people will satisfy will be their genitals and bellies.
Everything will decay but there is a glimmer of hope. Just taking the name of Krishna would help one escape life and attain moksha.
Tom makes references from other indo european religions as well, this is not a culture war or culture war adjacent thing, mostly just something I found super fascinating given that they all were faiths that were very similar for the most part and got many things about the future right. The issue with kaliyuga is that of values, we have seen astounding technological and economical growth, the truth in many places is that many have lost values that were considered important by those who appreciate antiquity (I do at least). Many will not agree but even then, would appreciate any thots on this.
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The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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So it turns out that the triple-parenthesis thing can get you banned from reddit even for benign nonsense. Some context: in some open source AI image models, you can use parentheses to emphasize terms that you want the model to pay more attention to. In this case, the author wrote "(((detailed face)))" and some other terms in their image prompt.
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
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[Note: discussing Shutterstock here but I would assume broadly the same applies to Getty Images and other, similar stock media sites.]
Okay, okay, I know this isn't nearly as wide-interest a topic as more general stuff about how AI art is going to impact society, but it's also something I wonder about, dammit, and I want to get some opinions on the topic.
SHUTTERSTOCK'S BUSINESS MODEL
Shutterstock.com operates a two-sided marketplace. Artists and photographers sell stock images, stock music and stock video to Shutterstock, and Shutterstock makes its money turning around and selling usage rights to those images.
The people and organizations (mostly organizations) that use Shutterstock do so because a lot of times you want an image, but it doesn't matter that much what the image is-- it just matters that it vibes right with the rest of the text.
The advantages of rolling with Shutterstock instead of going directly to artists is pretty obvious:
-
You don't have to talk to anyone or do any kind of negotiation
-
Shutterstock grants you legal indemnity whereby if somebody sues you because they don't like that you used a particular Shutterstock image, Shutterstock is willing to pay out on your behalf (up to a varying amount based on the license.) There is a sense in which Shutterstock is a very limited legal insurance company, which is necessary because there's no principled way of figuring out who actually owns what rights to a particular online image.
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It's much much cheaper to grab a stock photo than to actually commission something, and Shutterstock is easily big enough to where you can probably find something dimly related to the topic you're writing about.
THESIS: SHUTTERSTOCK IS SCREWED BECAUSE OF AI ART, PROBABLY WITHIN THE NEXT COUPLE YEARS
The above points have worked really strongly in Shutterstock's favor in the past, since the alternative to shutterstock is either (1) going to Getty Images, which is reasonable (the two are pretty similar), (2) going to an individual artists (which is bad because of the points above), or (3) just doing without an image. Now we have a new alternative, (4): AI art.
AI art is swiftly being commoditized-- we have DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and NovelAI all competing to be the best nearly-free unique image generation service on the web. That means you'll soon have another option for stock imagery, which is simply generating it-- again, almost for free-- on one of the aforementioned sites. You wouldn't have the indemnity that Shutterstock offers, but you also wouldn't need it because as a factual matter you know that image's provenance! You made it (in a sense) and it's 100% unique.
ISN'T AI ART KIND OF SHIT, THOUGH?
This is becoming less true by the day. I've noticed that Google's and OpenAI's showcases of really awesome (but totally gated off) AI media generation systems are typically about a year or two behind the open-source implementations of those, and if you haven't noticed, Google's image generation systems have gotten really really good. The clock is ticking.
BUT WHAT ABOUT THE LEGAL GREY AREAS AROUND THE COPYRIGHT OF AI-GENERATED WORKS?
No law about using AI images will ever be enforceable in reality, because there's no principled way to tell if a picture was generated by AI or not.
There is also the nearly-as-fundamental issue of products like Photoshop swiftly integrating AI components into your workflow. If you drew a picture and then used inpainting on it, is it AI generated? What if it was just a few pixels? What if it was almost all of it? How would anyone know which it was?
BUT SURELY NOT HAVING THE LEGAL IMPLICATIONS OF AI-GENERATED WORKS IS WORTH THE COST OF A REAL STOCK IMAGE
There are also legal implications-- albeit minor ones-- surrounding Shutterstock's images. You need to keep track of which images you have Enhanced vs Standard licenses for, and if you have standard ones there are a large variety of restrictions around precisely what kinds of projects they can be used for and how successful they are allowed to be before you escalate to Enhanced. AI-generated art doesn't come with this kind of headache, because again, nobody has any plausible claim to own the image since it is entirely original.
Check out the standard license restrictions:
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Print up to 500,000 copies
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Package up to 500,000 copies
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Out of home advertising up to 500,000 impressions
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Video production up to a $10,000 budget
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Unlimited web distribution, on the plus side
That means, if you're a small company using Shutterstock images for any kind of limited use case, you have to track in particular how many print copies you made of whatever stock photo you used so that you can ensure you're within compliance. And Shutterstock and Getty Images can and will go after people they believe have violated their usage license restrictions.
SURELY THE COST SAVINGS CANNOT BE THAT SUBSTANTIAL?
Enhanced image licenses-- ones which offer additional usage rights, like for web distribution and such-- go for 80-100 dollars a pop on Shutterstock's website. Standard licenses are fifteen dollars per license, or nine dollars-ish if you go for the bundle (and remember this comes with compliance headaches).
WHAT IF SHUTTERSTOCK JUST ACCEPTS THAT AI IMAGES ARE A THING AND LETS THEM ONTO THEIR WEBSITE?
The main thing that differentiates Shutterstock from a smaller competitor is that Shutterstock's moat-- the thing that lets them charge a premium for their services-- is that all the artists are there and uploading images to the site. And why are the artists there? Because the customers are there, and the customers are there because the art is there! It's the same kind of feedback loop that's why Amazon is eating the world, and why Uber/Lyft haven't been followed up by a hojillion equally-successful ridesharing startups.
But right now there's nothing stopping someone enterprising from building himself a stock photo website populated entirely with AI-generated images. Imagine lexica.art, except it offers unlimited usage licenses for five dollars a pop. Would customers go for that? Maybe. Though honestly if the lure of generating almost-free imagery without usage restrictions was on the line, this new stock photo website would have be really good.
Fundamentally, unlimited AI image generation at scale would drive down the cost of art immensely regardless of whether Shutterstock is on board or not. Same problem that artists are having.
COULD THEY SELL TRAINING DATA, MAYBE?
Shutterstock is already scraped all to hell with the results of said scrapes openly available on the web. Easier to sell a thing if people haven't already (even illicitly) taken it. Frankly even if they could pivot into this market, that's almost certainly a much much worse business to be in.
It's possible that lawmakers will force companies with language models to train only on data they've purchased the rights to. I doubt this will happen-- Google and Microsoft and OpenAI have deep pockets, and would stand to lose a great deal from such a law. But it's possible. A general language model shutdown would absolutely mean Shutterstock and its competitors could hang on a while longer. But it would have to be international, since if only the US passed that kind of law, oh, hey, guess what, Stable Diffusion was built by an English company. And an international law enforcing copyright on language model training sets strikes me as unlikely.
BUT SURELY THEY CAN STILL SELL VIDEO AND MUSIC!
Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
This article is written by yours truly. I'm a historian by study and have been thinking more and more about civilizational politics. I'm willing to bet this is going to be a big mover of geopolitics in the next decade onward.
With the ongoing 'rise of the rest,' we're living in a time of great narrative-building by rising powers who want a seat at the table. Although I'm not a subscriber to the 'clash of civilizations' thesis by Huntington at all, I do think that civilizational narratives are potent justifications for spheres of influence. They are so malleable and vague, thus making them valuable chips for geopolitics.
With globalization as we knew it waning, there have been efforts to repackage the nation-state order into looser blocs justified by culture. Many people take liberal universalism for granted, but I believe cultural particularism could potentially become the dominant form of international relations. Alliances are already forming on these grounds. It's arguably the single biggest obstacle to Fukuyama's "End of History" thesis.
In this piece, I first open with some background on 'civilizational theories of history' and why they were initially a fad. I then profile four states who are now leveraging such narratives to project power abroad.
Highlights:
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PredictIt vs Kalshi vs CFTC saga continues
-
Future Fund announces $1M+ prize for arguments which shift their probabilities about AI timelines and dangers
-
Dan Luu looks at the track record of futurists
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This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
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I'm a latinamerican psychologist, and I've been working for 5 years in this field. Starting in my undergraduate years, I've always been very aware of some fundamental flaws of my profession, and I've gathered some arguments that I'd like to discuss. My point is the following: Psychology is grossly overrated, and this allows all sorts of abuses. I believe that I'm not saying anything new, and I'm certainly not the first one to bring up this issue. However, I've found that psychologists have very little interest in discussing it.
For the most part, all of my arguments stem from a conference given by philosopher Georges Canguilhem at a conference back in 1956. My main thesis is the same as his, but I say it in my own words, and I have adapted it to the recent developments of psychology.
This conference was called: What is psychology? So, what is it?
If we go to the American Psychological Association's webpage, we'll find the following definition:
Psychology is a diverse discipline, grounded in science, but with nearly boundless applications in everyday life.
They then go on to detail the different fields on which a psychologist may work. Notice how the emphasis is less on what psychology is, and more in what psychology is useful for. This is because, as Canguilhem says, as psychologists cannot define what they are, they are forced to justify their existence as specialists by means of their efficacy.
Now, this isn't necessarily bad. You can help people without knowing why or how you are helping them. The problem is that psychologists take their efficacy as proof that their theories are right. For instance, let's take one of psychologist's objects of study: Depression. There are literally hundreds of psychological theories about depression, and you'll find the whole range of them: From those that state that it's merely a neurochemical imbalance in the brain; to those that state that it's a lack of positive reinforcement in life; to those that believe it to be an existential and spiritual crisis arising from capitalist conditions. They all have techniques to treat depression, and they all work. But they cannot be all equally correct at the same time. It's the Dodo bird Verdict: "Everyone has won and all must have prizes".
A psychologist may argue that this is in fact something good, since psychology studies a complex problem, and having a diversity of opinions broadens the discussion. And perhaps, there must be some common factors that explain why different, and even opposing theses all seem to work at the same time. This is a good argument, but it's already far from mainstream psychology: Each psychological school is only interested in selling their particular brand, and they explain the other schools' success only because of the parts of their own theory that the other schools implement. And there's a good reason for this: It's simply impossible to integrate all of psychology without a common language. And this common language has never existed (Watson, the founder of behaviorism, complained in the 20's that two psychologists with different formations would define a simple concept like "emotion" in a different way). So the integration path only leads to an eclecticism where everything that is useful is sewed up into one profession in order to give the impression that it's just one seamless discipline, an eclecticism where everything works but nobody knows why, but the fact that it works is taken as the only and definite prove that it is true. As a psychologist called Steven Hayes said: "What is considered true is what works". I'm still still at awe at how a psychologist such as Hayes, who is one of the fathers of contemporary psychology, can blatantly speak about the epistemological bankruptcy of psychology in such outrageous terms, and how can he believe, even for a second, that it's a satisfactory answer to the problem at hand!
In the current state of the matter, the only reason why cristal therapy and angel therapy are not psychological therapies approved by the APA, is because they are lacking evidence of their efficacy. But this lack could easily be fixed if we really wanted to. Under the right circumstances, literally everything works. There's art therapy, massage therapy, cognitive therapy, psychoanalytical therapy, sex therapy... hell, under the right circunstances, even murder may be therapeutic. We can produce thousands of working solutions to a problem, without shedding any light on its nature.
Psychology is, therefore, the science of producing solutions that work for people that need them. Sounds too broad? It is. Psychology knows no limits. Are you depressed? There's some psychological advice for you. Are you having children? There's some for you too. In love? Out of love? Yep, we got it. Are you a political candidate? A psychologist may counsel you. A mathematician? Psychology is the science of cognitive processes. You want revolution? Not without psychology. Are you a failure? Then you need a psychologist, obviously. Are you the most successful man in the world? Psychology will help you manage all that success. Since all problems are human, and since psychology studies human beings, there's no single problem where psychologists don't meddle. This should be cause for caution. We shouldn't hurry to find solutions to problems that we do not yet understand. But psychology goes in the opposite direction, and it goes the whole nine yards, and then some.
But, by what authority? Why do we trust psychologists to speak about politics, family, or work? Because, according to them, they are grounded in science. But we have shown that this science is epistemologically bankrupt: It works, therefore it's true. So we may not argue with psychology's results, but we may question its authority. How do we know that psychology is more than just a systematization of common sense, categorized by the criteria of efficacy, and translated into scientific terms? I believe that this is why psychological theories are oftentimes awfully boring. They are just made to suit a specific audience, to answer a specific question with the terms that are popular at the time when it appears, and made to be discarded, not when better evidence comes up, but when something else becomes popular.
So, does this mean that we should stop teaching psychology, and burn all psychology books? Not at all. Psychology is useful, and it does help. But the fact that you have an effective technique to treat anxiety, does not mean that you get the authority to determine what's rational or what's irrational. You only have that: A technique to treat anxiety. And that's good enough, in my opinion. I believe that psychology's problems may be fixed with a healthy dose of skepticism and humility - two things of which we are in dire need nowadays. Psychology, to me, is a good example of how scientific hubris plants a whole forest in order to hide one leaf. In the current state of affairs, perhaps not all problems can be solved, and there are things that are outside our control. We shouldn't try to hide those problems, we should try to understand them to the best of our ability and live them as the problems they are. Psychology simply has too many solutions, and too few interesting questions.
Here are some references that I quoted on this text, I'm too lazy to cite them all in APA format:
Canguilhem, G. (1958). What is psychology? First published on Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale.
Hayes, S. (2004). Acceptance and commitment therapy, relational frame theory, and the third wave of behavioral and cognitive therapies. In S. C. Hayes (Ed.), The act in context: The canonical papers of Steven C. Hayes (pp. 210–238). Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-53131-013
Watson, J. B. (1913). Psychology as the behaviorist views it. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1926-03227-001
Definition of psychology by the APA: https://www.apa.org/about
It is of note that I didn't even mention the replication crisis in this text, which further complicates psychology's epistemological basis. Here's the wikipedia article about this problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_psychology
Affirmative Action Empire by Terry Martin deals with the Soviet Union’s nationalities policy in the period from 1923 to 1939. I picked it up based on my interest in ethnic politics in colonial and post-colonial states. While it seems well-researched and was very interesting at points, I’d call it a book for specialists rather than one of general interest. It filled in a lot of details, but didn’t have many surprises, and I finished it without gaining any wholly new insights into the broader topic of ethnopolitical competition.
Before I go further, I hear you ask: Wait a minute, was the Soviet Union a colonial state? I contend that for practical purposes, yes. The Soviets didn’t think of themselves that way – Martin says that Lenin was comparable to Woodrow Wilson for anti-Imperialist rhetoric. But the Soviet Union inherited the geopolitical boundaries and governing infrastructure of the old Russian Empire, a vast entity encompassing millions of square miles and numerous ethnic, linguistic, and cultural groups. For convenience sake, I’ll be referring to the non-Russian population of the USSR as “subject peoples”. Since the new government didn’t intend to grant any of these subject peoples political or economic independence, they were effectively sitting on the old tsar’s throne.
If I were to summarize the Soviet nationalities policy in a single sentence, it would be: “a f*cking mess.” Throughout the period in question, the Soviets were torn between a) their desire to encourage national self-expression on the part of the subject peoples in the belief that it would enhance Soviet power and b) their intense mistrust of any possible social or political competitor to the central government. Martin differentiates between the “positive line”, associated with the first impulse and the “negative line”, associated with the second. The positive line fostered celebrations of national language, culture, etc, while the negative line brutally suppressed any unsanctioned nationalist activity. Critically, there doesn’t seem to have been a clear line between sanctioned and prohibited forms of national self-expression. Rather, the line was constantly in flux, as a result of intra-party conflicts and the changes in the geopolitical environment. More than once, Martin recounts stories of mid-level figures who were caught on the wrong side of the line by a sudden shift in the prevailing winds. Revolutionary politics being the cutthroat business it was, these figures usually paid a severe price for their miscalculation. At best, they lost their position. At worst, they went to the gulag or the firing squad.
The Soviet’s initially indulgent attitude towards national self-expression had several drivers. The first was Marxist ideology, which asserted that nationalism was one of the necessary stages on the road to communism. Second was the assumption that a pro-nationalities policy would make the subject peoples feel more invested in the new Soviet state. Lastly was “the Piedmont Principle”, the belief that encouraging nationalism amongst the Soviet Union’s subject peoples would actually help the USSR project influence beyond its borders i.e. the Belarussians within the USSR could be used to influence the Belarussians in Poland, etc. The Soviets would ultimately prove to be badly mistaken in this last assumption, and this realization would trigger a major shift in policy. More on that later.
The ”positive line” of the nationalities policy took several forms. First was linguistic preferencing, i.e. the right of the various subject peoples to be educated and conduct business in their own language. This point, seemingly minor in comparison to other measures like land redistribution, occupies a good chunk of Martin’s book, and also seems to have absorbed a great deal of attention from the highest levels of the Soviet leadership. My guess is that this is because it was a relatively low-cost way for the central government to signal their support for subject peoples. Material support, what we would nowadays call “development aid”, was expensive and the object of fierce competition. Political or economic independence was obviously out of the question. Ergo, linguistic preferencing.
In spite of numerous decrees and directives, linguistic preferencing never got as far as either the Politburo or would-be nationalists would have wished. Martin says this this because the Soviets never backed up these decrees with the USSR’s most effective way of signaling commitment to a policy: the gulag. Local officials naturally spent a good bit of energy on figuring out exactly what would and would not get them sent to Siberia. When they realized that failures to meet various linguistic targets (hire X percent of Y language speakers, publish X documents in indigenous language, etc) rarely led to more than a stern talking to, they de-prioritized accordingly. This tendency was exacerbated by the fact that the “negative line” occasionally did crack down on supposed “bourgeois nationalists” whose support for linguistic preferencing seemed a little too enthusiastic. Naturally, prudent officials chose to play it safe and give lip service to linguistic preferencing while putting little actual weight behind it.
Another component of the “positive line” was land redistribution. This took place mostly in the “Soviet East”, the region you now call Central Asia if you’re being scholarly or “the Stans” if you’re feeling snarky. Then as now, these countries were relatively under-developed and only lightly touched by western influences. A number of efforts were made to redistribute prime agricultural land from Russian settlers to the indigenous population in these regions. This went exactly as well as you’d expect. In my experience, the desire to hold on to what you have is virtually a universal constant of human nature; I can only presume this goes double for Russian peasants living close to starvation for generations. There was much discontent, and occasionally outright bloodshed, mixed in with forced relocation and ethnic cleansing. In the case of Kazahkstan the forced relocation was done with such a heavy hand that the Politburo
actually rebuked the local security services for their handling of the issue.
Martin identifies poverty, land ownership disputes, and a relatively recent date of colonization by Russian settlers as the major factors driving ethnic conflict throughout the USSR. Given that these conditions were so prevalent in the Soviet East, it seems unsurprising that the USSR’s “de-colonization efforts”, to include land redistribution ultimately never got very far. As Martin puts it, the Soviets inherited a segregated society in the region, and while they abolished legal segregation, they soon accepted de facto segregation – in living spaces, in work environments, and even in lines for rations – as the price of doing business. In one example, a Soviet factory inspector noticed that the workers barracks were broken down along ethnic lines. When he asked why, he was told that there were fewer brawls that way.
To me, however, the most interesting aspect of the “positive line” was a campaign of “affirmative action” that corresponds almost precisely to the modern use of the word. The Soviets made a concerted effort to recruit members of the national minorities to jobs within the administrative state – in other words, to bring them into the professional managerial class as we now call it. In effect, it was an attempt to manufacture a new elite, one which was presumably more loyal to the state, system, and party which had given them their position. Martin doesn’t explicitly say this, but I think we can infer it.
To me, this raises all sorts of fascinating questions. Was this new elite actually more loyal to the USSR? (The fact that when the Soviet Union eventually collapsed, someone like Heydar Aliyev could transition seamlessly into an Azerbaijani nationalist after 28 years as KGB officer suggests that they probably weren’t). Did they clash with traditional elites within their own communities, or they mostly recruited from said traditional elites? (Given that elite=landowner in most societies up until very recently, and that the Soviet Union was notoriously not fond of land owners, I suspect the former, but I could be wrong). Et cetera, et cetera. Unfortunately, Martin doesn’t share my fascination with intra-elite competition, so he doesn’t explore these questions very much.
There are some insights to be gleaned, however. For example, there is some discussion of the “Red/Expert problem.” In a paranoid state like the USSR, which prioritizes loyalty above all else, how do you deal with the fact that certain highly-technical enterprises can only be run with the assistance of specialists of dubious loyalty? For a striking example of this problem in action, consider Sergei Korolev, who after six years in the gulag, rose to become head of the Soviet Rocketry program, because the USSR could not afford to fall too far behind in the arms race. The Soviets faced an analogous problem when trying to promote individuals of the desired nationality into leadership positions in technical departments.
One answer, apparently, is to have figureheads who hold the title, but leave the actual work to others, nominally lower-ranking. In one example, neither the head nor deputy of an oblast (an administrative unit that seems to correspond roughly to a county, I am happy to be corrected on this because I’m really not sure) agricultural ministry actually had an office or desk. Instead, the ministry was de facto being run by a non-party specialist. Martin draws a parallel with Malaysia’s “Ali Baba businesses”.
This whole thing caused me to reflect on a deficiency in the “simple model” of societal hierarchies. There’s a tendency to think of hierarchies as strictly linear, something like this:
Elites
Middle Class
Working Class
Applying this to the USSR, we might construct a model with the central committee at the top and rural non-party members at the bottom. In fact though, an examination of the structure of the USSR would reveal a complex web of different agencies and officials whose authority and responsibility overlapped in complex ways
[I can't post the diagram on the site for some reason. Take my word that's a mess)
I’m oversimplifying the the hideous tangle that was the CPSU, but that only reinforces the point I’m trying to make, which is that hierarchies don’t actually work like this in practice. The reality of power relationships is that they’re always in flux, and that multiple parallel hierarchies can coexist and intersect in surprising ways. A more accurate model might be something like:
[Another diagram I can't post]
I can’t find any information about whether Korolev himself ever became a member of the communist party; for the point I’m trying to make, we’ll assume the answer is no. As a non-red expert, Korolev was in theory subordinate to the party apparatus. But as a key leader in an area of vital strategic importance, Korolev presumably enjoyed access and influence well beyond that of most low-ranking party members. The likely outcome of any conflict between Korolev and a party member would depend on who that party member was, what their connections within the party were relative to Korolev, the nature of dispute, et cetera. Whatever the theoretical great chain of being that bound the Soviet Union together, in practice there would always be room for competition. This room for competition is exacerbated by the fact that the upper echelons of any hierarchy, by their nature, tend to be dominated by fiercely ambitious individuals who are quick to exploit any opening to advance their own agenda. In the words of that great strategic thinker, Jack Sparrow, at the end of the day, the only rules that really matter are what you can do and what you can’t. The true balance of power was thus constantly being re-negotiated.
This isn’t a new idea of course, though I’m not sure how often I’ve seen it formalized. C.S. Lewis wrote of the “Inner Ring”, the self-appointed clique which asserts itself through influence. I’ve heard that Foucalt liked to say that power was multifocal, and maybe this is what he meant. Once you start to look, discrepancies between official hierarchies and non-official ones are everywhere. Stalin himself is a textbook example of someone who rose to wield near-absolute power in spite of being nominally a mere administrator. His title of “Secretary General” literally referred to his position as someone who took notes at the meetings of the politburo. Under certain circumstances, I can imagine that these discrepancies serve a useful purpose – useful for someone, anyway. Deflecting responsibility for unpopular decisions, for one thing. Concealing key nodes/personnel from potential hostile actors for another application.
Where was I? Oh right, talking about the creation of a new elite. Unfortunately for the various nationalist actors, at a certain point, the USSR began to reverse course. Remember the Piedmont Principle? The idea that cultivating nationalism would allow the USSR to project power into ethnic minority groups in neighboring regions? Gradually, Soviet decision makers perceived that the current was in fact running in the opposite direction; cross-border nationalist ties were trumping loyalty to the Soviet Union. By 1932, the USSR was in the midst of the Holomodor, one of the most brutal famines of the twentieth century. Ukrainian cross-border nationalism was blamed, rightly or wrongly, as a major contributor to the situation. Additionally, the resentment of the Russian majority was reaching potentially dangerous levels. So, the USSR reversed course.
By the late 1930s, the “Great Retreat”, as Martin calls it, was in full swing. National institutions were gradually abolished, various symbolic policies such as linguistic preferencing were walked back, and Russian culture and identity were gradually rehabilitated. In the aftermath, the Soviet Union was reinvented as a largely Russo-centric entity. This does not seem to have been a crudely ethnocentric form of Russian chauvinism, but rather cultural nationalism. “The Russian language was the principal path for non-Russians to participate in that culture.” Assimilate and you could, at least in theory, enjoy the full status of any other member of the USSR.
So what can we learn from this book? Mostly, I think, that there’s a strong tendency on the left to underestimate the power of nationalism. Earlier in the twentieth century, a number of prominent leftists had declared that then-hypothetical Great War was just a clash of capitalist imperialists and that the workers of the world would unite and turn against their masters. This spectacularly failed to happen, and the working classes mostly turned out to be enthusiastic participants in the war effort, at least at first. Given the First World Wars contribution to the ultimate breakdown of the prevailing European class system, perhaps this was the right choice for them. I’m not sure why this tendency exists or how it developed. Both the political left and nationalism in the modern sense are in some sense products of the enlightenment. Revolutionary France certainly demonstrated that the two could be tightly fused. For that matter, so did Zionism. My best guess is that it’s because “left” ideologies tend to be universalist in character. Like, say, Christianity (as opposed to traditional Judaism), left ideologies offer a prescription for all mankind, one which is supposed to transcend the petty divisions of language, culture, or geography. Additionally, these ideologies naturally attract wonkish intellectual types who see themselves as transcending these same barriers, and don’t see why everyone else can’t or won’t.
I suppose we also learned that when position and prestige are at stake, vast amounts of fire and brimstone will be spilled over seemingly minor issues (language, various symbolic policies, etc). But I feel like we already knew that. We also learned that when you sort people into groups based off of any particular set of characteristics, they immediately start competing on the basis of those characteristics. But I’ve always felt like that was pretty intuitively obvious to anyone who bothered to stop and think about it.
Could a similar scenario occur today? I’m not sure. The USSR was, as mentioned before, the heir of a vast multinational empire. Various groups competed on the basis of language, ethnicity, and culture. Affirmative action programs today mostly seem to happen within a nation, along (arbitrarily defined?) sub-national identity categories. When those categories are sufficiently robust, robust enough to lead to significant conflict, sure, I could see a backlash. But I don’t think we’re there yet. My basic model for this is that affirmative action is a form of elite patronage, and that competitive elites engage in it in order to create or mobilize their own base of support. In times of elite overproduction, you naturally see patronage of all sorts materialize from rival elite groups. In order to face a backlash, enough elites would have to decide that affirmative action was causing more trouble than it was worth. I’m not really sure what sort of upheaval it would take for the American ruling class to walk back affirmative action policies or rhetoric. Competitive elites are willing to take risks, after all. That’s what makes them competitive. And as the existence of more or less the entire post-colonial world attests, elites are willing to accept quite a lot of collateral damage before they abandon identity-based mobilization of potential supporters.
Scott wades into the Culture War again with a delightfully dorky dialogue about Columbus Day. Contains lots of references to the other other Scott.
Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
I'm aware that similar programs and apps exist but I would prefer the userbase here, for a variety of reasons, if there exists a subpopulation who could benefit from a regular setting out of goals/reading and then following up on how successful it was, or not, hopefully learn some lessons and rinse, repeat.
For my own part I have an exam on the 22nd which, if passed, entitles me to undertake a bar practice course, and I have the funds to allow me good chambers and no income for two or three years before finding my own feet. I probably have 5000 pages of reading to do over the next fortnight. My friend/lover is in a similar position but he has to pass the equivalent of what in the United States might be called the boards or medical college exams. His isn't until February 2023 and if I pass mine (takes five weeks to be notified) I will have two months to focus on him and some of the tendencies I repeatedly see in his writing that will make examiners think he is a political hot potato or too zany (not surprisingly, being a psychiatrist, and though I say it myself, probably the only person who could have answered the standard medical school admission questions with total cliches about wanting to help alleviate suffering etc ... and been sincerely earnest. He is simultaneously the most insightful reader of people and diagnostician, as well as seemingly unable to answer a basic question demanding a basic answer (i.e. questions basically designed to ensure he will be a safe practitioner if unsupervised, since he has already done the job for years so presumably has the knowledge base) without pumping out long irrelevant screeds that inevitably prevent career advancement.
Whether your project is building a boat or editing a textbook, and you are willing to work incredibly hard and fight procrastination, please message or DM me and we'll set up something mutually beneficial. Ideally include in your message your personal weaknesses that you are hoping to address, and of course the nature and scope of what you intend to do.
I like in Australia so the time zone disparities will inevitably cause issues.
All the best and hopefully looking forward to meeting some people here in a similar position to my friend and I.
Regards
Richard
None of the explanations makes a lot of sense to me. Either there was a very weird and unlucky combination of things that created an accident or accidents or someone took an action that doesn't make a lot of sense IMO, or someone stepped up and managed to pull something off that would seem beyond their capabilities.
Ships and aircraft of various countries were near the area at times before the explosion but that's pretty meaningless. The Baltic has a lot of civilian and military traffic it isn't some obscure patch of distant Ocean that no one really cares about.
Theories -
1 . Russia did it -
They certainly had the capability. Wouldn't even need to put a ship or sub or aircraft anywhere near where the explosion happened, they could transport explosives through the pipeline. They could of course just turn it off (and in fact had done so for Nord Stream 1 (2 was shutdown on the Germany side). They were not getting any revenue from the pipelines anyway. OTOH that was partially their choice (they shut down #1) and while there prospect fro revenue in the future was dim, it wasn't zero so you would think they would hold up some hope. A 10 percent chance of many billions is worth a lot of money. Why would they do it? Well they might avoid liability for not meeting contractual obligations. Could be a "burn your ships" or "burn your bridges" type of action showing contempt for the west and internally making an internal political signal that there can be no backing down. Could be a threat that other important pipelines and at sea infrastructure are vulnerable. Could be an attempt to make people think the US did it to try to sew division within NATO. Could be an attempt to block the Germans fro musing the part of the pipeline in German waters for an offshore LNG terminal.
2 - Anti-war Russian saboteurs did it -
From a perspective of motivation this perhaps makes the most sense. Perhaps an anarchist anti-war and anti-government group, trying to harm Russia. But they are the least likely to have the capability. I doubt they could pull off getting to the site of the damage with a large explosive. Maybe they had people working in Gazprom and sent explosives through the pipeline? That's possible but it seems unlikely they would have that access.
3 - Germany did it -
All the theories seem unlikely to me (although it did off course happen, so something unlikely happened) but this perhaps the least likely. Like Russia they could destroy it through the pipeline without needing to get close to the area of the explosion. But Germany while they decertified Nord Stream 2, actually wanted to continue to get gas from Nord Stream 1 for a time. Also they might use the parts of Nord Stream 2 in German for an offshore terminal (not sure if the plan was to use 1 or 2, but eventually both could have been used). Why would they do it? The government could have thought that they may face pressure to open up Nord Stream 2 this winter, and didn't want to go back on their decision to close it so they closed off that possibility. But than why also blow up Nord Stream 1. Some faction in the intel services or some saboteurs who worked for Nord Stream AG? Not impossible but it also seems one of the least likely answers.
4 - US did it -
Why would they do it? Well there could have been a thought that Germany would cave on allowing Nord Stream 2 operations and this closes that option. Maybe 1 was hit as well because the Russians could always decide to send gas that way and the Americans didn't want the Germans buying Russian gas? Also the US supplies LNG, while currently the exports are at capacity since the Freeport terminal explosion, there may be the thought that NG prices generally and specifically LNG would go up with an exploded major pipeline, and/or that Germany would be more locked in to buying US LNG in the long run. But it would require an extraordinary amount of willingness to take serious diplomatic risks, for a pretty modest gain.
5 - Ukraine did it -
It would lock out the possibility of Russia receiving funds from selling gas through the pipelines. Also maybe they could hope Russia would be blamed. Still this seems one of the least likely possibilities. Russia wasn't getting any revenue through those pipelines at the moment and it seems unlikely they would ever get revenue through #2. Ukraine would seem to have less ability to pull it off than the other countries listed, they aren't near the pipeline, and their countries resources are going in to the war effort. And the risk would be enormous. There is a good chance it eventually would get out and some chance it would get out quickly, which could devastate support for Ukraine within Germany and harm support elsewhere, and that support is very important to them. The gains would be very small compared to the potential harm.
6 - Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania or Poland did it -
They have easy access to the area and a strong dislike for Russia. But while their downside isn't as large as Ukraine's it still seems too reckless. I can see them taking the risk for an action that would at one stroke mean Russia's defeat (if any such action existed) but not for such modest potential Russian down side. It doesn't really impact Russia's war.
7 - China did it -
Maybe they wanted to make things even crazier for Europe and hoped the US would be blamed? This is another one of the least likely possibilities IMO.
8 - Some other country did it - Who? Why? Can't think of any scenarios that seem to make much sense.
9 - It was an explosion caused by underwater live munitions from previous wars. Apparently there were such munitions near the Nord Stream 2 breach. But what would cause them to shift to where the pipeline is and blow up now? Also it seems a Nord Stream 1 breach was not near any known location of underwater munitions.
10 - Methane Hydrate plugs - See https://thelawdogfiles.com/2022/09/nordstream.html
Such plugs are apparently more likely to form when the gas is sitting in place, like it was in Nord Stream. And they could cause pipeline ruptures. But both pipelines at pretty much the same time? Also unless there was more than the normally very low level of oxygen in the pipelines (which is monitored to avoid corrosion and at higher levels combustion risk) that would allow for combustion I don't see how you would get explosions as large as those that were detected.
11 - Other - Different causes for each pipeline (different countries sabotaged each one, or one was an accident and one was sabotage), eco-terrorism (would they have the ability and would they want to release that much methane), aliens, etc. No real reason to seriously consider any of these without some specific evidence. They are all a bunch of wacky theories, that I'm not taking seriously. Something I haven't even considered? Well of course that's possible but what?
By request, I am crossposting my post on becoming a German citizen for discussion here.
Hello fellow Mottizans, I have emerged from my lurker cave to share good news with you all: I have become a German citizen! But not through naturalization or birth; I used an uncommon route with a new and somewhat strange process: a StAG section (§) 5 declaration. While going through this, I had learned a lot about that citizenship laws of Germany and some comparisons with other countries, as well as spending (too much) time browsing various expat and citizenship forums and subreddits. I’d like to subject you to share with you what I’ve learned in this weird journey, through intergenerational citizenship and questions of national identity.
Background
With so many immigrants out there, why should you listen to me, an American moving between western countries? Well, I, personally, value it more when people put in effort for something with less assured payoff; few want to split lottery tickets, everyone wants to split the winnings. Similarly, I moved to Germany as someone with only German heritage, as a normal immigrant, and then more than a year after that a new law offered me a privileged path to citizenship through legal magic. In short, I committed to Germany and then received the winning lottery ticket.
A bit more about my path: I moved to Germany in 2020 with the EU Blue Card for highly qualified immigrants. I chose Germany because part of my family was from Germany, and in the typical American style I considered myself German-American. I had visited Germany and liked it, although I knew visiting and living somewhere are two very different things. But what I would really like to stress is that visiting Germany felt like visiting a home, a place that felt natural. I’ve visited plenty of other countries, and everywhere else it was clear that they were foreign, “alien” countries. It was obvious when I was in Japan that no matter how much I might like visiting castles or eating ramen, Japan would remain a foreign country. When it was unclear whether I would be still working in Germany, a friend suggested that I work with them in the Netherlands, and a big hangup was that the Netherlands was a foreign country, this despite the fact that they speak more English and I would be around more English-speaking expats. Germany was the ancestral homeland, and no other country could ever replace that.
German citizenship is based primarily on jus sanguinis, citizenship by blood: someone is a German citizen at birth because their parents were citizens. But this was, in the past, primarily patrilineal. In fact, the German citizenship in my family was cut off when my German grandmother married a foreigner: she automatically lost her German citizenship, rendering her stateless and all her children non-Germans, including my father, and all of her grandchildren were not German either, including me.
In August 2021 Germany passed an amendment to the Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz (StAG), or nationality law. The new StAG § 5 allows those who, to quote the federal authority, “were previously excluded by gender-discriminatory regulations from acquiring German citizenship at birth may now acquire it by way of declaration. Briefly, the post-war German Basic Law (a constitution) forbids gender discrimination, and so those who were excluded from acquiring citizenship due to this gender discrimination could claim it back; for example, until 1975, German women would not pass down citizenship by default. The process is new enough that the relevant authority here in Germany, in a major city, did not know about it. But I collected all of our old documents, submitted my application, and now (as of the time of writing) the certificate is in the mail in hand!
I did it, I became a German citizen! I did not naturalize, I gained citizenship through declaration (queue up, “I didn’t say citizenship, I declared it!”). I did not have to reside in Germany for 6-8 years, I did not have to speak German, pass any test, pay any money or do anything at all but submit a few documents and citizenship was handed down in a puff of magical legal smoke by a bureaucrat I’ve never met before. If I suffered some brain damage I could commit terrorism or racially motivated crimes, things that would have excluded me before, and still keep the citizenship (I don’t think I’ll test that though). And my children will also be German citizens from birth, and their children, and so on forever, just as it had been passed down to me from forever ago (well, at least since 1871).
But importantly, I haven’t been saying that I became German. I don’t speak German, I didn’t grow up in Germany, and neither did my parents. By the Basic Law, I am a German because I hold German citizenship, but I try to look past the purely legal standing. I don’t think the idea of who is German has a really clear and universal answer; different people and different Germans give different answers. Perhaps we can talk about the traits of Germans, but until we have access to the pure and perfect German Form, arguments are really all we can get. I will reference that concept of being a German plenty though, and the legal vs. cultural German.
That gives my background and stake in the matter, and it will make for a nice dinner party story but isn’t that important. In fact, nothing really changes legally for me anyway, my permit covered it all before. I think it’s much more interesting to talk about what I’ve learned along the way, as it might actually be interesting and useful for everyone else. So here it goes!
The Strangeness of Descent Laws
German citizenship by descent is a mess, but it’s interesting to take a little dip into the law. Before I only said that German citizenship is based on descent, which glosses over many of the complications that arise in tracing that path. A nice guide on the process can be found here. The US (and most countries in the Americas) use primarily jus soli or birthright citizenship, i.e. you are a citizen of a country if you are born in that country, but also has citizenship by descent. But it’s much more restrictive; in particular, while German citizenship by descent is basically limitless, US citizenship by descent requires that if e.g. the child has two citizen parents, at least one resided in the US at any point, or if only one parent is a US citizen they must have resided in the US for at least five years. I call this a “sunset clause” in citizenship, something that terminates citizenship automatically without a connection to the home country.
Without a solid sunset clause in the German citizenship by descent, you get some (in my personal view) strange lines of descent. Someone whose great-great-great-grandfather left Germany in the late 1800s can be a German citizen directly if it happens to pass only through the male line in key years. Compare this to someone whose German mother married a foreigner and they were born in 1948; their path to citizenship would be under StAG §14, and they have to establish a close connection to Germany, such as speaking German and having close family members in Germany. Here we see that you can only be a legal German if you establish that you are already a cultural German. Add on to this complications such as if your parents naturalized before or after you were born, if you served in a foreign military, if you every voluntarily gained citizenship of another country, and it gets complicated. To note, Germany has added a sunset clause: if a German citizen is born abroad after 1999, any of their children born abroad only retain German citizenship if the authorities are notified before the child’s first birthday. No more surprise citizenships by descent a hundred years down the line.
All of this has led to a lot of people sorting through old paperwork to find out if they are secretly German citizens or can become one. I like to point to the growth of /r/GermanCitizenship as part of it, but the perhaps better known example is for Italy, where it is popular enough to have consular wait times in years and a CNN article about it. I’ll just voice my personal opinion that all of this is a little strange to me; when one out of sixteen or thirty-two of your ancestors at a particular level came from a particular country, it’s hard for me to see where exactly your connection comes in. The legal case may be perfectly fine, but the cultural part falls through. I normally see it chalked up to “honoring ancestors” or “keeping their memory alive,” which turns into an excuse to have a nice passport and travel the EU visa-free as far as I’ve seen.
And I should mention that Germany, in principle, discourages dual citizenship. If you naturalize, you normally must give up other citizenships, if it is possible and doesn’t cause undue hardship. Notably, the fees to renounce US citizenship are high enough that the authorities may permit you to keep US citizenship if you make less per month than the fees, $2,350. It also permits dual citizenship if other citizenships were gained automatically, i.e. from birthright. There are many exceptions nowadays, but the principle still exists, and causes problems sometimes when e.g. people are forced to choose a nationality.
Finally, I will point out that StAG §5 vs. §14 (post- vs. pre- Basic Law) seems weird to me. A German woman could lose her citizenship by marrying a foreigner in e.g. 1947, have a child in 1948 then one in 1950; the first would have to prove their ties to Germany, while the second would get in without any restrictions, but in both cases the relevant legal situation that caused the loss of citizenship is the same and only stopped in 1950(ish). For the second child, the claim would be that because the Basic Law forbids gender discrimination, they were unfairly discriminated because they should have been able to obtain citizenship from a female parent. I’m not a jurist but the legal idea seems fraught: how could laws prohibiting an action in the future justify retroactive corrections? But §5 covers much more than that, affecting people born as late as 1993.
But the biggest takeaway from all of this is that I have the impression that citizenship laws oftentimes are capricious and arbitrary, relying on old documents that some may or may not have and offering various paths or restrictions that change over time. Countries try to both preserve a legal basis for citizenship while trying to reasonably restrict it, while working under changing social views and massive changes in the way the world works.
I think a look at the citizenship laws is helpful mostly to find out that they don’t really answer anything but a legal question, which is important but not what I’m after. I hope no one thinks that someone born to a German mother and a foreign father in 1974 is definitely not a citizen while a sibling born in 1976 definitely is, even if the legal situation is clear.
The Reddit Expatriation Community
That’s enough about citizenship laws then. I was fascinated by (potential) immigrants, especially on Reddit, that I came across in my browsing. As an American, I grew up with the idea that America was the land of immigration and that immigration only really flowed one-way. I think the statistics bears this out, with the US having one of the lowest shares of its population living abroad. Why would someone leave the freest and richest country?
I feel like this is changing, slowly. As other countries become richer, it becomes less clear that America is the automatic best option, and it is probably easier; I can do things like videocall my parents every week and translate written text on my phone, things that make it vastly easier to emigrate. And let’s be clear, the advantage of being a natural Anglophone is huge. On Reddit, which I think is primarily dominated by Americans and Anglophones in general, some of the migration-focused subreddits have seen a lot of growth: Amerexit, iwantout,and expats. Those are my three favorite (or at least most entertaining) subreddits, and they run the gamut from “America sucks, I want to leave!” to “How can I leave my current country (serious answers only)?” to “Living in a foreign country sucks in so many ways.” Pick your favorite, I guess. And like in everything else, politics is the mind-poison in immigration. But there are many common themes; I’ll reference posts without linking to avoid inter-subreddit drama.
I think most of these immigrants, and probably most immigrants in general, are what I would call “materialist immigrants.” Most people are looking to improve their economic situation or living standards. How they rate these things is up to them; someone may value high salaries directly, while others value more consistent healthcare coverage or walkable neighborhoods. If they’re from a western country they may consider themselves (and others like them) an expat instead of an immigrant, but it all amounts to the same thing. Even that German citizenship guide I linked before explains the benefits of becoming a German citizen in almost purely economic terms: live and work in the EU! Travel visa-free in so many places with a German passport! Go to university for free! If you’re destitute, Germany will take care of you! Drawbacks: none, you don’t have to learn German or pay any taxes or do anything at all for anyone else.
And the discussions reflect this living-standard/economic focus, and an entirely Ameri-centric view. Currently in /r/AmerExit, someone is hating on the US because… (checks subreddit) they can find cheap mineral water while on vacation in Italy. No, I’m not joking, it’s the first point in a top post at the time of writing. Someone may fear American politics enough to instead move to Turkey, a country that literally went through an attempted military coup in 2016 and has a nice book review regarding Erdogan-as-dictator on ACX. Or a contemporary favorite, overlooking the fact that many countries have more strict abortion laws than some US states.
When looking for somewhere to go, I see so often that people think of moving to completely different countries, treating them all the same as if “western European” covered everything they need. One person might say Germany and… Wales? How about the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Germany, France or the UK? Another might want to move to Ireland or Scandinavia, but they speak fluent Spanish. Countries are interchangeable, as long as they have some greenery, good weather and everyone there aligns with their values. Everyone is “willing to learn the language,” a completely costless declaration that I always translate to, “I may learn to swim if you throw me in the middle of the ocean.” Even at the end of the natural process, I can see someone declare that they are finally an “EU citizen” after eight years as if their citizenship was granted by Brussels and not their home country.
Beyond the standard internet/Reddit stupidity, these feel like they cover an individualist- and money-focused worldview. And it naturally feeds materialist immigration that disregards the people who actually live in these places, which causes critical problems in adjusting to a life in a foreign country. Remember what I said about /r/expats? It’s the opposite version of /r/AmerExit, where people have gone to a foreign country and found that, yeah, it’s not America. This is what happens in the culture-clash. The day-to-day reality of living in a country that sees the sun for a few hours a day in the winter sets in. Of dealing with people who will always treat you like a foreigner. Of being far away from family and former friends. It’s tough to live somewhere far away from home, and it’s tough to know that before you actually make the move.
But… why is it tough? I haven’t seen many expats complaining about their jobs, most complain about the people around them and their social life. And the world seems very thoroughly Americanized: I visit American-style department stores, see advertisements in English, I can almost always ask to speak English with people, it all sounds very convenient to and for me. They have the healthcare and sparkling water they so desperately desired. What’s missing? Why can’t they assimilate?
Part 2 follows.