This is a short first-person account of schizophrenia from a professional philosopher. I thought it might be of interest to y'all, in part because of the way that the author thinks through his hallucinations. His allusion to "hermeneutical justice" also seems worthy of reflection. It has long seemed to me that the most important thing anyone can have is a close and supportive family (==a network of unconditional long-term commitments to mutual well-being), and that some of the worst ideas in human history have been driven by people who lack a close and supportive family looking for ways to compensate. To have spent 30 years as a successful academic in spite of brushes with "near-collapses," thanks primarily to the efforts of a wife and a close friend, is perhaps even more interesting than the first-person account of rationally managing hallucinations.
ChatGPT does Advent of Code 2023
LLM are all the rage and people are worried that they will soon replace programmers (or, indeed, every possible office job) so I decided to do an experiment to see how well ChatGPT-4 does against Advent of Code 2023.
What is Advent of Code
Advent of Code (henceforth AoC) is an annual programming "event", held by Eric Wastl, that takes place during the first 25 days of december. Each day at midnight a problem unlocks, consisting of an input file and a description of the required solution (either a number or a sequence of letters and numbers) to be determined by processing the input file. To solve the problem you have to submit to the website the correct solution. Once you do part 2 of the problem unlocks, usually a harder version of the problem in part 1. You don't have to submit any code so, in theory, you could solve everything by hand, however, usually, this is intractable and writing a program to do the work for you is the only easy way to solve the problem.
There's also a leaderboard where participants are scored based on how fast they submitted a solution.
Problems start very easy on day 1 (sometimes as easy as just asking for a program that sums all numbers in the input) and progress towards more difficult ones, but they never get very hard: a CS graduate should be able to solve all problems, except maybe 1 or 2, in a couple of hours each.
Prior history
This isn't the first time ChatGPT (or LLMs) was used to participate in Advent of Code. In fact last year (2022) it was big news that users of ChatGPT were able, in multiple days, to reach the top of the global leaderboard. And this was enough of a concern that Eric explicitly banned ChatGPT users from submitting solutions before the global leaderboard was full (of course he also doesn't have any way to actually enforce this ban). Some people even expected GPT-4 to finish the whole year.
A lot of noise was made of GPT-3.5 performance in AoC last year but the actual results were quite modest and LLM enthusiasts behaved in a very unscientific way, by boasting successes but becoming very quiet when it started to fail. In fact ChatGPT struggled to get through day 3 and 5 and probably couldn't solve anything after day 5.
Why do AoC with GPT?
I think it's as close to the perfect benchmark as you can get. The problems are roughly in order of increasing difficulty so you can see where it stops being able to solve. Since almost all of the problems in any given year are solvable by a CS graduate in a couple of hours is a good benchmark for AGI. And since all of the problems are novel the solutions can't come from overfitting.
Also around release people tried GPT-4 on AoC 2022 and found that it performed better so it would be interesting to see how much of the improvement was overfitting vs actual improvement
Methodology
I don't pay for ChatGPT Plus, I only have a paid API key so I used instead a command line client, chatgpt-cli and manually ran the output programs. The prompt I used for part 1 was:
Write a python program to solve the following problem, the program should read its input from a file passed as argument on the command line:
followed by the copypasted text of the problem. I manually removed from the prompt all the story fluff that Eric wrote, which constitutes a small amount of help for ChatGPT. If the output had trivial syntax mistakes I fixed them manually.
I gave up on a solution if it didn't terminate within 15 minutes, and let ChatGPT fail 3 times before giving up. A failure constitutes either an invalid program or a program that runs to completion but returns the wrong output value.
If the program ran to completion with the wrong answer I used the following prompt:
There seems to be a bug can you add some debug output to the program so we can find what the bug is?
If the program ran into an error I would say so and copy the error message.
If the first part was solved correctly the prompt for the second part would be:
Very good, now I want you to write another python program, that still reads input from a command line argument, same input as before, and solves this additional problem:
I decided I would stop the experiment after 4 consecutive days where ChatGPT was unable to solve part 1.
ChatGPT Plus
Because I was aware of the possibility that ChatGPT Plus would be better I supplemented my experiment with two other sources. The first one is the Youtube channel of Martin Zikmund (hencefort "youtuber") who did videos on how to solve the problems in C# as well as trying to solve them using ChatGPT (with a Plus account).
The second one was the blog of a ChatGPT enthusiast "Advent of AI" (henceforth enthusiast) who tried to solve the problems using ChatGPT Plus and then also wrote a blog about it using ChatGPT Plus. Since the blog is generated by ChatGPT it's absolute shit and potentially contains hallucinations, however the github repo with the transcripts is valuable.
The enthusiast turned out to be completely useless: it resorted often to babystepping ChatGPT through to the result and he stopped on day 6 anyway.
The youtuber was much more informative, for the most part he stuck to letting ChatGPT solve the problem on its own. However he did give it, on a few occasions, some big hints, either by debugging ChatGPT's solution for it or explaining it how to solve the problem. I have noted this in the results.
Results
| part 1 | part 2 | notes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| day 1 | OK | FAIL | |
| day 2 | OK | OK | |
| day 3 | FAIL | N/A | |
| day 4 | OK | OK | Uses brute force solution for part 2 |
| day 5 | OK | FAIL | |
| day 6 | FAIL | N/A | ChatGPT Plus solves both parts |
| day 7 | FAIL | N/A | |
| day 8 | OK | FAIL | ChatGPT Plus solves part 2 if you tell it what the solution is |
| day 9 | FAIL | N/A | ChatGPT Plus solves both parts |
| day 10 | FAIL | N/A | |
| day 11 | FAIL | N/A | ChatGPT Plus could solve part 1 with a big hint |
| day 12 | FAIL | N/A |
The perofrmance of GPT-4 this year was a bit worse than GPT-3.5 last year. Last year GPT-3.5 could solve 3 days on its own (1, 2 and 4) while GPT-4 this year could only solve 2 full days (2 and 4).
ChatGPT Plus however did a bit better, solving on its own 4 days (2, 4, 6 and 9). This is probably down to its ability to see the problem input (as an attachment), rather than just the problem prompt and the example input to better sytem prompts and to just being able to do more round-trips through the code interpreter (I gave up after 3~4 errors / wrong outputs).
One shouldn't read too much on its ability to solve day 9, the problem difficulty doesn't increase monotonically and day 9 just happened to be very easy.
Conclusions
Overall my subjective impression is that not much has changed, it can't solve anything that requires something more complicated than just following instructions and its bad at following instructions unless they are very simple.
It could be that LLMs have reached their plateau. Or maybe Q* or Bard Ultra or Grok Extra will wipe the floor next year, like GPT-4 was supposed to do this year. It's hard not to feel jaded about the hype cycle.
I have a bunch of observations about the performance of ChatGPT on AoC which I will report here in no particular order.
Debugging / world models
Most humans are incapable of solving AoC problems on the first try without making mistakes so I wouldn't expect a human-level AI to be able to do it either (if it could it would be by definition super-human).
Some of my prompting strategy went into the direction of trying to get ChatGPT to debug its flawed solution. I was asking it to add debug prints to figure out where the logic of the solution went wrong.
ChatGPT never did this: its debugging skills are completely non-existent. If it encounters an error it will simply rewrite entire functions, or more often the entire program, from scratch.
This is drastically different from what programmers.
This is interesting because debugging techniques aren't really taught. By and large programming textbooks teach you to program, not how to fix errors you wrote. And yet people do pick up debugging skills, implicitly.
ChatGPT has the same access to programming textbooks that humans have and yet it does not learn to debug. I think this points to the fact that ChatGPT hasn't really learned to program, that it doesn't have a "world model", a logical understanding of what it is doing when it's programming.
The bruteforce way to get ChatGPT to learn debugging I think would be to scrape hundreds of hours of programming livestreams from twitch and feed it to the training program after doing OCR on the videos and speech-to-text on the audio. That's the only source of massive amounts of worked out debugging examples that I can think of.
Difficulty
Could it be that this year of AoC was just harder than last year's and that's why GPT-4 didn't do well? Maybe.
Difficulty is very hard to gauge objectively. There's scatter plots for leaderboard fill-up time but time-to-complete isn't necessarily equivalent difficulty and the difference between this year and last year isn't big anyway (note: the scatter plots aren't to scale unfortunately).
My own subjective impression is also that this year (so far) was not harder.
The best evidence for an increase in difficulty is day 1 part 2, which contained a small trap in which both human participants and ChatGPT fell.
I think this points to a problem with this AIs trained with enormous amounts of training data: you can't really tell how much better they are. Ideally you would just test GPT-4 on AoC 2022, but GPT-4 training set contains many copies of AoC 2022's solutions so it's not really a good benchmark anymore.
Normally you would take out a portion of the training set to use as test set but with massive training set this is impossible, nobody knows what's in them and so nobody knows how many times each individual training example is replicated in them.
I wonder if OpenAI has a secret test dataset that they don't put on the internet anywhere to avoid training set contamination.
Some people have even speculated that the problems this year were deliberately formulated to foil ChatGPT, but Eric actually denied that this is the case.
Overfitting
GPT 4 is 10x larger than GPT 3.5 and it does much better on a bunch of standard tests, for example the bar exam.
Why did it not do much better on AoC? If it isn't difficulty it could be overfitting. It has simply memorized the answers to a bunch of standardized tests.
Is this the case? My experience with AoC day 7 points towards this. The problem asks to write a custom string ordering function, the strings in questions represent hands of cards (A25JQ is ace, 2, 5 jack and queen) and the order it asks for is similar to Poker scoring. However it is not Poker.
This is a really simple day and I expected ChatGPT would be able to solve it without problems, since you just have to follow instructions. And yet it couldn't it was inesorably pulled towards writing a solution for Poker rather than for this problem.
My guess is that this is an example of overfitting in action. It's seen too many examples of poker in its training set to be able to solve this quasi-poker thing.
What is poetry? Well, I used to think I had some sort of idea and could at least distinguish a poem from ordinary prose when I saw one, but apparently such attitudes belong back in the Ark.
This, to me, is not a poem. But by the canons of modern taste, it sure is one! Some better and more astute critic referred to "chopped-up prose" in the context of modern poetry, and that is what this is (at least, to my eyes). Remove the line breaks, and you have a bog-standard piece for online space-filling. It'd fit perfectly in one of those cooking or hobby blogs where the producer is semi-professional and needs page scrolling to generate income, so they fill up the spaces with tons of reminiscences about Grandma in the kitchen on those summer/autumn/winter days cooking up the recipe, and tons of filler blah, until you eventually get to the recipe or knitting pattern or advice on how to embezzle from your employer.
I'm not expecting modern poetry to neatly rhyme and fit into the patterns of past poems, but I do at least expect a poem. Not a 'pome'.
Irish Linen, by Lane Shipsey
Pure Irish Linen
a phrase from long ago
woven into those plain tea-towels
that smoothed away wet suds
from Mother’s wedding set
Her good linen cloths
were kept to buff glass and china
or left safely in the drawer
while gaudier prints took on the grime
and stains of daily wear
I teased her for it then,
not knowing the grown-up equation
of good with expensive
And you didn’t buy Pure Irish Linen,
it was a thing you were given
A cloth spun and woven
from flax pulled and scutched
across the border, a fact on which
we did not dwell much, in Dublin
where we never called it Ulster linen
The words Pure, Irish, and Linen
no longer form an automatic cluster
Instead we buy the best fabrics we can muster
regardless of origin
whilst a machine blows our dishes dry.
As I said, remove the line breaks and you have a twee, faux-folksy piece of musings suitable for anything from a mommy blog to a chin-stroking piece on Norn Iron and how we down South approach it to a meditation on modern living and/or cottagecore aspirations, applicable for print or online media, traditional or social.
Edition version below and you look me in the eye and insist "No, that is a true real poem", I dare you.
"Pure Irish Linen" - a phrase from long ago, woven into those plain tea-towels that smoothed away wet suds from Mother’s wedding set. Her good linen cloths were kept to buff glass and china or left safely in the drawer while gaudier prints took on the grime and stains of daily wear.
I teased her for it then, not knowing the grown-up equation of "good" with "expensive". And you didn’t buy Pure Irish Linen, it was a thing you were given.
A cloth spun and woven from flax pulled and scutched across the border, a fact on which we did not dwell much in Dublin, where we never called it "Ulster" linen.
The words Pure, Irish, and Linen no longer form an automatic cluster. Instead, we buy the best fabrics we can muster regardless of origin, whilst a machine blows our dishes dry.
This has been a howl into the abyss on behalf of dinosaurs everywhere.
In an Infinite Loops podcast episode with Venkatesh Rao, Art of the Gig, the discussion revolves around the importance of courage and taking risks in order to find meaning in life and business.
They talk about the gig economy, and argue that one of the most important things for meaning in life and business is having the courage and nerve to take risks.
Rao explains how many people start out with naive optimism, then get punched in the face by life and don't know how to regain agency. Agency and using it creates meaning, according to him. He casually dismisses the meaning crisis as a failure of nerve and a lack of courage on the part of young adults. I could probably write a whole piece on extended adolescence.
On the other hand, he does acknowledge that many people are so overburdened by life's traumas that they may not even reach the naive optimism stage. Even if they do, some people get lucky and are never challenged, whereas others get screwed and are thrown out of the economic system. This division looms especially large in the developing world.
These conditions lead to a bifurcated system where, as Rao calls it, the "tragically lucky" go through life with naive optimism, but near the end of their life have a crisis because they never learned to deal with challenges or change themselves to have more agency. This archetype would be the guy who comes from a rich family and "fails upward," just collecting titles and promotions without thinking deeply or having to engage with the darker side of the world. The tragedy here is that they never have a chance to truly grow or develop as people, because they never have a real opportunity.
On the other hand, those who deal with adversity when young, or those who don't have strong models in their life who display courage and a sense of agency, either can't have a positive viewpoint on their lives due to trauma, or enter the workforce/college/wherever, fail badly, then feel cheated and can't work up the nerve to take another risk.
These two life experiences are so distinct that they're almost perfectly mismatched for people to understand each other. I don't think it neatly aligns with different political groups, but I'm sure many are likely to make that comparison.
So the question becomes - how do we set up a society in which people can routinely take small risks or deal with small amounts of adversity, and learn to become more agentic in steps as they grow?
Unfortunately, our modern society seems designed to do the opposite of this training for courage. Children are increasingly coddled, their parents' minds befuddled with safetyism and the precautionary principle. In the Western world especially, people are presented with one track in life. Typically, this track starts with schooling, which goes directly into a career, dovetailing neatly into retirement the moment you turn [insert cultural age of retirement here].
People have a narrative where they either stay on the track their whole lives and are successful, or they fall off at some point and are failures. Risk-taking becomes incredibly difficult because the perceived risk of getting off the beaten path becomes much larger. The standard PMC careerist feels that if they take even small risks, they risk throwing their life into disarray. Learned helplessness and non-courageous behaviors become instilled, in my view, due to early-stage trauma, which makes this process even more weighted against risk.
With these priors, we come to an interesting problem. On the one hand, we need to help kids have less trauma and not learn as many passive or non-agentic behaviors. Reducing trauma is often a stated goal of many safetyist maximizers and those who hold a torch for the precautionary principle.
However, we've also got to figure out how to challenge kids. It seems that the artificial hoops we have them jump through in grade school, then the workforce and/or college, don't have an even enough distribution. A lot of this probably has to do with the narrative associated with school and the one-track life I discussed above.
I'm in favor of having high school include some sort of working apprenticeship, and I'd even support time being split 50/50 with half of the time having kids be in a working environment, the other half in the classroom. This inclusion of work would solve a lot of the problems with hyperactive kids that can't learn in a classroom environment. It would also make more well rounded adults, as they'd have a taste of the 'real world' while still being in a relatively safe environment. The big issue would be getting businesses on board and making sure there aren't any legal issues - parents would be a nightmare here I'm sure.
We could also create a sort of bank of school years, or at least make it more culturally acceptable to go back to school. Have kids graduate at 16 and enter the workforce, with two years of schooling 'banked' in case they fail out. Maybe make it mandatory before 30 so there isn't a sharp social distinction. The extra two years could focus on business skills or help students that can't carve out a place in the economy find their niche.
I've tried to be as charitable as possible in this piece, and I'd ask commenters do the same. I firmly believe that one of the reasons this topic stays muddled is the constant refrains around fragility and people being 'snowflakes' or whatever the term de jour happens to be. I don't see how harsh language and derision will help solve this problem, it seems far more based on structural issues in our schooling or overall narratives, rather than a personal failing of individuals. I'm open to disagreement here as a separate point, of course.
This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from around the world. Feel free to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the Ukraine War, or even just whatever you’re reading.
Argentina
Paging @DaseindustriesLtd
Argentina opened the first of its three rounds of elections on Sunday; the main three way election will happen on October 22, and if no one gets a majority (very likely) then the two top ranked candidates will go to a runoff November 19. To the surprise of everyone, the largely fringe turbo-libertarian Javier Milei won unexpectedly, placing him as the front runner for October, and making him suddenly the talk of the town in international press. Milei’s party, La Libertad Avanza, performed terribly in recent municipal and regional elections; his own polling at its best was mixed and his ideas polled much worse than himself a man. So his 30% results in the primary genuinely surprised most people. The results look even more impressive at the provincial level, where Milei won 16 of 24 provinces, with remaining provinces divided between the other parties:
[Milei’s] ultra-liberal discourse was imposed, as was foreseeable, in urban centers with more middle classes, such as the cities of Córdoba or Mendoza . But the electoral surprise was greater when the scrutiny revealed that the leader of La Libertad Avanza also reached the poorest districts of the country. ..
As happened in Chaco and Jujuy, Milei was the candidate with the most votes for the PASO in most of the poorest districts in the country, according to the survey carried out by Infobae .
These poorer areas are the traditional stronghold of the Peronists/Kirchnerists, so their switch to the libertarian is quite the sea change. ¿Quien es Milei?
Javier Milei is a former economist and Congressman who’s built up a huge media presence in the past year. It’s a little like if one of the weirdo right wing internet influencers we sometimes discuss here became a major party candidate, down to the fact that he rages about leftism while also being kinda libertine and degenerate, partial to the occasional threesome, moonlighting as a tantric sex instructor, and running with a VP who I guess does cosplay. Otherwise, socially he’s a grab bag of right-wing culture war talking points, generalized hatred of the elites (whom he calls “the caste”), banning abortion in all cases including rape and incest, the right to bear arms, climate change is a hoax, etc - plus a few out there ideas, like the novel proposal that people should be able to sell their own organs or children on the free market.
But really Milei’s support is behind economics, because there’s nowhere that the establishment parties have failed more manifestly. The ruling party, Unión por la Patria (previously Frente de Todos), is the Peronist/Kirchnerist left mega-populist party which set the institutional tone for Argentina’s stagnation since the 30s. Their opposition, the center right Juntos Del Cambio, was originally elected to do what Milei says he will - utterly reform the broken system the Kirchnerists created. And to their credit they did oversee some significant reforms, but most critically failed to address Argentina’s central ill of inflation (partially because it would have conflicted with their other campaign pledge to balance budgets). After a brief upward surge in the economy after they took power, ultimately they left it as they found it, in shambles.
With both parties dropping the ball so horrifically on inflation, Milei has made the centerpiece of his campaign a highly controversial plan to switch from pesos to dollars. Surely this would address inflation (just by keeping it at US rates) but the transition would be remarkably painful. Supposedly about 60% of voters actually oppose the plan and it’s not actually clear Argentina can physically, literally do this - many people apparently think they genuinely do not have sufficient reserves to convert their existing money base entirely into dollars. There’s also the risk that it would hurt competitiveness by inflating the value of Argentina’s exports relative to the region; this was one of the big criticisms of the 90s peso convertibility. Even so, possibly this is still preferable to nonstop runaway inflation.
Milei’s “chainsaw plan” also includes: “eliminating 11 government ministries, reducing government spending by 15% of the country’s GDP, and privatizing or closing down state companies and agencies, among other austerity measures. A potential Milei administration would also eliminate free state schools and healthcare, and replace them with a “voucher system” designed to subsidize whoever needs them, according to his government plan.” I couldn’t really comment on how useful Argentina’s government ministries are, eliminating them could actually be disastrous, especially for their pension system - but it should be said that currently Argentina funds its government expenses with the money printer, so if inflation is ever going to be addressed spending does have to curbed (though perhaps the medicine doesn’t need to be quite that extreme).
To be clear, the election is still anyone’s contest. Milei pulled ahead of the establishment parties only by a hair, and this with neither of them formally unified under a chosen candidate. Also, 30% of the electorate abstained (voting is mandatory in Argentina so this means more than it would most places) and almost half of the ballots were left blank or null. LA’s poor performance in municipal and regional elections also indicates that his party may be less popular than he is, and if he wins with a minority there’s no chance his zanier ideas will be pushed through (and with no provincial governments under LA control he loses a major route to reduce spending). Still, it certainly represents a population extremely weary with their governing parties.
China
The whole world seems to be talking about China’s economy starting to corrode, as economic activity slows down and deflation has begun to set in:
China's National Bureau of Statistics announced Wednesday that consumer prices dropped annually in July for the first time in two years, dipping 0.3%, just slightly better than median estimates for a 0.4% decrease . . .
Year-to-date, China's exports are down 5% compared to last year, while imports have dipped 7.6%
Manufacturing activity has contracted for four straight months July exports declined at the sharpest rate in three years, at 14.5% annually
Doomsaying about how China’s overleveraged, ponzi scheme-esque real estate sector will spell the end have been going on forever without materializing, though now maybe they finally are. Various pundits have already started asking if we’ll soon look at China the way we now do Japan - confused that we ever considered them a serious economic rival. This seems a little premature to me, but I also don’t follow China closely and would be interested to hear from others.
Japan
Speaking of which, Japan grew at a remarkable 6% this quarter, more than doubling expectations. Aside from one crazy quarter in 2020 this is the highest rate they’ve had in a very long time. BBC reports that Japan’s tumbling currency, down 10% relative to the dollar, has actually been a boon for exports, which coupled with an influx of tourism has given their stagnant economy a little boost:
Profits at the country's car makers - including Toyota, Honda and Nissan - have been boosted in recent months as they saw increased demand for exports. While a weak currency makes what the country imports more expensive, prices of commodities on global markets, like oil and gas, have fallen in recent months. That has resulted in a drop in the value of imports, down 4.3% from the previous quarter, which EY's Nobuko Kobayashi called "a major culprit for GDP growth".
Japan's economy has also been helped by a rise in tourist numbers after the government lifted border restrictions at the end of April. As of June, the number of foreign visitors to Japan had recovered to more than 70% of pre-pandemic levels, according to the country's national tourism authority. Spending by tourists is also expected to give the country's economy an even bigger boost from this month after China lifted a ban on group travel. Before the pandemic Chinese visitors accounted for more than a third of tourist spending in Japan.
I’ve reported previously on Japan and Korea ending their trade war and normalizing relations following the comfort women/forced labor lawsuits. Japanese PM Kishida, Korean President Yoon, and Biden will now hold their first ever standalone meeting on Friday to “institutionalize their trilateral ties”. This will mean holding yearly summits like this, strengthening security cooperation, training, and intelligence sharing against threats from China and North Korea. “The three leaders are also expected to signal deeper cooperation in areas such as cybersecurity, supply chain resilience and fighting economic coercion.”
Ecuador
Following the assassination of a mayor, which put two of Ecuador’s provinces under a state of emergency, and the assassination of a candidate for the Presidential election, which put the rest of the country under a state of emergency, a third politician has now been killed - all of this in under a month and barely a week away from election. Pesto Briones was a local leader in the Esmeraldas province for the democratic socialist Revolución Ciudadana, party of the previous presidents Rafeal Correa and Lenín Moreno (the latter of whom later left/was expelled), and the current leading party in the polls for the upcoming election. This has been a remarkably violent period for Ecuador. Beyond the political violence overall homicides in 2022 were 4600, double the previous year, and 2023 is on pace to exceed that number still; so far there have been reportedly been 3,568 murders compared with 2,042 at the same point in the year during 2022.
Six Colombians have now been arrested in the murder of Fernando Villavicencio. Details are sparse but the Colombian drug trade is intertwined with Ecuador’s, and Villaviencio had been threatened by the cartels. Reportedly Villavicencio’s family has accused the Ecuadorian government of neglecting to provide sufficient security, lacking armored/bulletproof cars, leading him through public entrances and exits rather than established side routes, etc. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, in a message offering condolences for the assassination, made explicit the comparison between this and the group of Colombian mercenaries who assassinated the Haitian President Jovenel Moise.
South Africa
Former President Jacon Zuma has now been released after only two months of his sentence, reportedly due to a program to reduce prison overcrowding. Zuma was the previous leader of the ANC, and the central opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, has accused the move of political corruption (supposedly the overcrowding reduction measure was passed shortly after Zuma was sentenced). The far left Economic Freedom Fighters, who in part started as the anti-Zuma block of the ANC till they were expelled, have switched their tune and have been trying to pull away Zuma supporters from the ANC (Zuma and current President Ramaphosa are rivals), so are likely to be supportive.
The economy overall looks staggeringly bleak in advance of their election. Official unemployment has hit 33%, with observers suggesting the real rate may be as high as 42%.
When it comes to youth unemployment, the rate is 61% of 15- to 24-year-olds, according to official statistics, and a staggering 71% if you again count those who are no longer trying . . . it equates to 24 million adults out of a population of 60 million who are either unemployed or not involved in any economic activity and barely surviving . . . South Africa’s GDP needs to grow by 6% a year to start creating enough jobs just for the 700,000 people who enter the workforce every year…South Africa’s growth hasn’t approached that much-needed figure for more than a decade. Its economy — which grew by 2% last year — is expected to grow by less than 1% this year and between 1% and 2% for the next five years.’
Ethiopia
Less than a year after the war in the country’s northern Tigray region ended, Ethiopia’s military is battling an ethnic militia in the neighboring Amhara region in a part of Africa already ravaged by conflict.
The Amhara are the historic ruling group of Ethiopia, previously unseated by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, who after they were unseated in turn, later helped fill the ranks of the Tigray secessionist group from last year’s war. Current President Abiy Ahmed is a half-Amhara, half-Oromo who holds both ethnic parties within his Prosperity Party coalition. However, he’s been blamed for some attacks on the Oromo (or for not doing enough to stop them) and is accused of leaning towards his Amhara side, at least by the Oromo secessionist groups which the government has also had to deal with.
This makes it somewhat ironic that Amhara forces are now turning against him as well. His post-war project has been to consolidate the different ethnic militias into a formal security force, just as he (somewhat) did by forming the ethnic political parties into one ostensible party. The Amhara militia Fano, which played a major role in fighting for the government during the Tigrayan War, has balked at this attempt to strip away their autonomy and (supposedly) leave them less secure to other ethnic attacks, and fighting has broken out. For now the government seems to have gained the upper hand and regained control of the areas taken by Fano, but the conflict is certainly not over. Ethiopia is straining right now under the weight of Sudanese refugees, so hopefully the conflict does not escalate.
One of the ways I pass my free time is to scroll through Twitter or Reddit looking for interesting or controversial articles to read. Occasionally, I only make it a paragraph or 2 in before I decide that I don’t trust the author, and that I can’t take anything they write seriously. This can happen even if the article is taking a position I already agree with. Sometimes there’s just something about the article’s style that seems like it can’t be trusted. I was originally going to write a post that contained all the pet peeves that would cause that to happen. However, after I got part-way through, I decided that if I included everything, then this entry would be too long. So instead, I’m writing about each one separately. Pet peeve #1: Portraying your opponent as a caricature.
The thing that inspired me to write about this topic was an article I saw on twitter. It’s an article about a proposed regulation that would force companies to make cancelling subscriptions easier. More specifically, it was about those companies’ reaction to it.
Companies Think Their Idiot Customers Will Accidentally Cancel Their Subscriptions if It's Too Easy
It begins:
The Federal Trade Commission’s recent proposal to require that companies offer customers easy one-click options to cancel subscriptions might seem like a no-brainier, something unequivocally good for consumers. Not according to the companies it would affect, though. In their view, the introduction of simple unsubscribe buttons could lead to a wave of accidental cancellations by dumb customers. Best, they say, to let big businesses protect customers from themselves and make it a torment to stop your service.
Those were some of the points shared by groups representing major publishers and advertisers during the FTC’s recent public comment period ending in June. Consumers, according to the Wall Street Journal, generally appeared eager for the new proposals which supporters say could make a dent in tricky, bordering-on deceptive anti-cancellation tactics deployed by cable companies, entertainment sites, gyms, and other businesses who game out ways to make it as difficult as possible to quickly quit a subscription. The News/Media Alliance, a trade group representing publishers, tried to refute those customers in its own comments to the FTC. The Alliance claimed its members actually receive “very few complaints” about cancellations. Consumers, according to the Association of National Advertisers, may actually benefit from annoying cancellation friction.
To be clear, I absolutely hate difficult to cancel subscriptions. I also hate so-called “free trials” that bill you if you forget to cancel. Some cancellation processes I’ve encountered were so difficult that they certainly seemed criminal. When I first heard about this proposal, I thought to myself “Finally, someone is going to do something about these predatory practices!”
I agree with the with the article’s apparent position on the proposal. The new rule is a good idea, and it’s needed. Even so, something about the article still managed to rub me the wrong way. Even before I started reading the article, I already disliked it just from the headline alone. By the time I had finished it, I was already trying to find out how the article was deceiving me.
The first sign of trouble was the headline:
Companies Think Their Idiot Customers Will Accidentally Cancel Their Subscriptions if It's Too Easy
This reads like a headline from the onion. You can tell just from reading it that it’s caricature of what they actually said. Companies don’t call literally their customers “idiots” like this. At least, certainly not out in the open.
The article continues:
In their view, the introduction of simple unsubscribe buttons could lead to a wave of accidental cancellations by dumb customers. Best, they say, to let big businesses protect customers from themselves and make it a torment to stop your service.
Again, this message is nothing like what you’d expect a large company to put out. Large companies don’t openly insult customers like this. Large companies also don’t refer to themselves as “Big Business”. This passage even has a little of embedded argument in it. It tells you that it’s a torment to stop your service. Nobody embeds counterarguments in their statements just so you can use it against them. This is supposedly based on what the companies said, but it’s been warped in obvious ways, and it’s hard to tell what the actual statement probably was.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. The article is full of this kind of thing.
Caricature itself isn’t bad if your audience already knows the subject matter, but it’s not a good way to introduce your audience to an opposing position. A caricature, by definition, distorts it’s subject by exaggerating it’s most ridiculous attributes. A caricature of someone’s argument is an exaggerated version of the most ridiculous parts of that argument. In their real statements, there may or may not be nuance and context that make the argument work, but if there is, I can’t expect to find that nuance and context in a caricature. Including it would undermine the idea of caricature itself.
A caricature of a statement is more than just a Straw Man, it gives a sense that the author doesn’t think it’s worthwhile to even check for context. Perhaps they don’t even think context can matter.
Some authors try to weasel their way out of such straw-man accusations by telling you “it’s just a joke”, even though they’re clearly trying to persuade you. A humorous poorly-reasoned argument is still a poorly-reasoned argument. If you have to fall back on “it’s just a joke” in order to defend it, then your point might not be on solid ground to begin with. Saying “It’s just joke” might as well be outright admitting that your argument is without merit.
If you want to actually be convincing, then you should instead, steel man your opponent. Essentially, you provide the best version of their position that you can. Include the nuance and context that makes it work. Then, you can explain why it is wrong.
This way might not feel very good. After all, why help out your opposition by presenting the best version of their argument? But doing so is actually helpful for you. It shows confidence in your own position. If it looks like an argument a real person would believe, then it doesn’t trigger as much skepticism. Perhaps more importantly, it protects you in case your reader learns the real argument from somewhere else. Learning your opponent’s real position won’t sway them as much because you’ve already told them about it. It gives your argument more sticking power.
You can still joke around about the opposing position. Just make sure that I know what that position actually is first. I don’t want to have to guess what their real position probably is.
About Half-way down the article, the author finally included an actual quote,
“If sellers are required to enable cancellation through a single click or action by the consumer, accidental cancellations will become much more common, as consumers will not reasonably expect to remove their recurring goods or services with just one click,” the Association said in a statement.
But at this point, it was too late, the distrust had already started to creep in. The author had already shown that he didn’t care very much how the companies’ actual statements worked.
I looked a bit further into it to figure out what the companies’ real statement was. The quote above, comes from a statement made by the Association of National Advertisers Their full statement can be found here.
This is the part where they talk about “click to cancel”
Requiring “simple” cancellation is a difficult standard for businesses to implement, as there is little detail provided to guide them to understand its meaning and how to comply with this ambiguous requirement. If sellers are required to enable cancellation through a single click or action by the consumer, accidental cancellations will become much more common, as consumers will not reasonably expect to remove their recurring goods or services with just one click. Such accidental cancellations could cause consumers to miss out on essential deliveries of food, water, or medical products, and could create the inconvenience of requiring the consumer to register again for a service they did not intend to cancel in the first place. The possibility of accidental cancellations could be greater in the mobile environment, which may be less optimized to manage complex processes such as account administration. Consequently, in many instances, it may be reasonable for sellers to require some form of customer authentication, or redirection of the consumer to a medium that best facilitates account administration, before processing a cancellation. As a matter of public policy, permitting reasonable customer authentication prior to cancellation helps to minimize mistaken or fraudulent cancellation actions, which lead to customer frustration and undesired lapses in the provision of needed goods or services. Several state-level negative option laws permit reasonable authentication procedures prior to cancellation,17 and the proposed amendments to the Current Rule should similarly allow companies to verify consumer identities prior to effectuating a cancellation choice.
This statement does make some reasonable points about why you might not want a literal 1-click cancel button. If I click a “Cancel” button in the navigation, at minimum, I would expect to see a confirmation page first. One that says “Do you want to cancel your subscription?” and a button that says “Confirm Cancellation”. That’s at least 2 clicks, one to get to the cancel confirmation page, and one to cancel. If my account was cancelled out of the navigation bar, that would be very surprising to me. Something like that really would lead to unintended cancellations. It also makes total sense to force users to log in, in order to cancel. I don’t want some random unauthenticated person messing with my account settings!
There is, however, one major problem with this statement. The proposed rule doesn’t actually require you to make a 1-click cancel button. “Click to cancel” is just a nickname. The actual requirement is a cancellation process that is at least as simple as the sign-up process, and through the same medium:
The proposal also requires sellers to provide a simple cancellation mechanism through the same medium used to initiate the agreement, whether, for instance, through the internet, telephone, mail, or in-person. On the internet, this “Click to Cancel” provision requires sellers, at a minimum, to provide an accessible cancellation mechanism on the same website or web-based application used for sign-up. If the seller allows users to sign up using a phone, it must provide, at a minimum, a telephone number and ensure all calls to that number are answered during normal business hours. Further, to meet the requirement that the mechanism be at least as simple as the one used to initiate the recurring charge, any telephone call used for cancellation cannot be more expensive than the call used to enroll ( e.g., if the sign-up call is toll free, the cancellation call must also be toll free). For a recurring charge initiated through an in-person transaction, the seller must offer the simple cancellation mechanism through the internet or by telephone in addition to, where practical, the in-person method used to initiate the transaction.
This rule requires a 1-click cancel only if you had a 1-click sign up in the first place. If a company requires authentication in order to sign up, then they can require authentication in order to cancel. If it takes you more than one click to sign up, then it can take more than 1 click to cancel. I sure hope these companies don’t have literal 1-click confirmation-less signup buttons, and I certainly hope they aren’t signing you with no authentication either!
But then again, maybe I shouldn’t be too hard on the The Association of National Advertisers for this oversight. The author of the Gizmodo article apparently didn’t catch it either. That would have been quite a good opportunity to make fun of the original statement, and it would have addressed the real statement too.
I’m not very forgiving when it comes to deceptive tactics. Once I get the sense that you’re trying to deceive me, I become suspicious about the whole thing. After all, if the author has already revealed that they don’t care about informing me accurately, how can I trust anything they say? Even if I already agree with their position, I can’t use it as a source. It’s just too unreliable; the people I’m citing it to would, rightly, mock me for it. It’s just not very useful, and mostly makes me dislike the author and maybe even their publication.
This is essentially a followup to the last meta post.
Big scary updates are done and seem to be fine, but our volunteers have been going absolutely mad with minor updates. Which is great! We have a bunch of people contributing tons of valuable tweaks and fixes and improvements to the codebase, thank you, I literally could not do this without you.
I'm just gonna repost this again because it worked the last time:
Are you a software developer? Do you want to help? We can pretty much always use people who want to get their hands dirty with our ridiculous list of stuff to work on. The codebase is in Python, and while I'm not gonna claim it's the cleanest thing ever, it's also not the worst and we are absolutely up for refactoring and improvements. Hop over to our discord server and join in. (This is also a good place to report issues, especially if part of the issue is "I can't make comments anymore.")
Are you somewhat experienced in Python but have never worked on a big codebase? Come help anyway! We'll point you at some easy stuff.
Are you not experienced in Python whatsoever? We can always use testers, to be honest, and if you want to learn Python, go do a tutorial, once you know the basics, come join us and work on stuff.
(if you're experienced in, like, any other language, you'll have no trouble)
Rules Changes
Thank you for discussion on the rule proposals! Here's what we ended up with.
Courtesy: Keep to a single account
We strongly discourage people from making alt accounts without good reason, and in the absence of a good reason, we consider alt accounts to be bannable on sight. Alt accounts are almost exclusively used for mod evasion purposes and very rarely used for any purpose that helps the community; it makes moderation more difficult and it makes conversation more difficult.
If you do feel you need an alt account (most commonly, if you're a well-established user who wants to post something that can't be linked to their public persona), please ask the mods.
If you don't want the mods to know about it either, be aware that there's a good chance we'll find out about it anyway.
Content: Post on multiple subjects
We occasionally have trouble with people who turn into single-issue posters, posting and commenting only on a single subject. We'd like to discourage this. If you find yourself posting constantly on a single subject, please make an effort to post on other subjects as well.
This doesn't mean you need to write megaposts! This can be as simple as going to the Friday Fun Thread once in a while and posting a few paragraphs about whatever video game you last played. But this community is fundamentally for people, and if a poster is acting more like a propaganda-bot than a person, we're going to start looking at them suspiciously.
This rule is going to be applied with delicacy; if I can find not-low-effort comments about three different subjects within your last two weeks or two pages of comments, you're likely fine.
These are still prototypes, if you have objections they can still be changed, without objections they'll get added to the Official Rules probably in a week or so.
Private Profiles
Again, thank you for discussion! I refined the planned system a bit (original plans: "remove private profiles".) The current system is that private profiles are available to established users or on request. We're leaving "established" intentionally vague, but it's basically a measure of how much you've been contributing. If the system considers you established, the checkbox will be in your settings; if the system doesn't consider you established, it'll be there, but grayed out and have a link to contact us.
(This is using roughly the same standard as our filtering system, but with much bigger numbers.)
We've also grandfathered in everyone who had a private profile, even those who don't meet the bar. This was definitely a carefully-considered decision! It has nothing to do with me not wanting to write the SQL query to revert profiles.
That said, if you're a newbie account that gets yourself banned, don't be surprised if a mod also resets your private flag.
Long Comments
A while back there was a meta post where I proposed relaxing the comment character limit. I came up with a proposal, people on the dev discord convinced me to relax it even further, then it just sorta sat there and moldered in the Issues queue for a bit because it wasn't the priority. Then I wrote an effortpost and said "shucks, this is over the limit! Okay, I'm going to just go and implement that long-comment request now so I can post my megapost for the good of the community. Aaaaand also so I can post my megapost."
Then one of our volunteers, without any knowledge whatsoever of the above decision, sniped it out from under me and implemented it, like, two days before I was going to sit down and do it.
Anyway, it's in now! The new limit is . . .
. . . a little more complicated.
The new limit is 50,000 characters if you don't want to be filtered. Are you okay with your comment being filtered as if you were a new user? Well, good news, the new limit is 500,000 characters. Yes, this is literally enough to post an entire novel, albeit a short one, as long as you're OK with the mods seeing it before the rest of the userbase does.
This is experimental; if it gets abused, don't be surprised if this gets changed.
This is now a general-purpose feedback post. Let me know how things are going!
This is a weekly thread for people to talk about foreign policy, current international relations events, or chat about IR history. Generally I start with a series of updates on different countries but the format here should be pretty free form / whatever people are interested in. To demonstrate that I want to have a special thread on less-remembered wars. Feel free to share your own (no need for it to be this long), or to talk about something completely else!
The Libyan-Turkic War
It’s pretty easy to understand why the 1911 Libyan invasion isn’t on anyone’s radar, being dwarfed by the size and devastation of World War 1, but I think it gets short shrift. After all, for Turkey and Libya this conflict might as well have been the start of World War 1. From Libya onwards Turkey is in constant war up until the conclusion of the Greco-Turkish war in 1922. For Italy the vast sums they spent on this war had significant repercussions for their performance in the war of 1914 and their political situation afterwards. Beyond putting World War 1 into a broader context, this is also a unique and interesting war in its own right. One historian, Sean McMeekin, described it as the last of the nineteenth century style wars on colonial conquest as well as the first of the twentieth century style anti-colonial guerilla wars. It also featured some of the first instances of modern technology, including the first use of a plane in a battle, and the first instance of a plane getting shot down in a battle.
The Italian Position
So what drove Italy towards this war? Basically a desire to join the ranks of the imperial powers. Italy had only been formed in 1861 and fully consolidated in 1871. Like Germany, they were late to the ranks of European nation states aspiring towards empire, and felt the need to catch up for prestige by snatching Somaliland and Eritrea. When I say the Libyan invasion was mostly about prestige, I feel like it sounds odd because nowadays it’s obvious why Libya is important to control. But oil wasn’t discovered until 1959 – back then it’s basically a patch of desert with a few slums. It mostly remained as part of the Ottoman Empire because the other, more powerful European colonizers didn't think it was worth conquering as they snatched up the other North African provinces.
At the 1878 Congress of Berlin France took Tunisia and Britain took Cyprus; to get Italy to sign off they soft promised them Libya. This was further cemented by a secret deal between France and Italy in 1902 for the French to respect an Italian invasion, and another deal in 1909 for Russian recognition of Italian Libyan in exchange for Italian recognition of Russian Bosporus.
In 1908 this started to build into a huge sort of nationalist movement centered around Libya, with articles in the press, wonderful propaganda posters, politicians drumming up support and so forth. The main opposition to the war effort was the Italian Socialist Party. In fact, socialists had been tenuously supportive of centrist Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti at the time, who had been courting them by expanding the right to vote and cinducting nationalizations, but the Libyan War was a major cleavage that drove them away from the coalition. The divide between the right and the left in Italy would never fully heal and only grow more violent in the buildup towards fascism. Itonically, one of the loudest voices against the invasion at the time was the young Benito Mussolini, back when he was still a leading luminary in the anti-war socialist movement and before he had decided that war and imperialism were actually hella sick. This is just one of the countless fascinating ways this conflict acts as a hinge between completely different eras.
The Ottoman Position
Meanwhile, on the other side, well, people debate on exactly where Turkey’s fall begin, but suffice it to say they had been taking Ls for a very long time. From the Crimean War onwards they had been giving successively more privileges to the European powers, giving up more of their control of their own finances, and watching as their provinces softly secede themselves away, like Egypt, or get gobbled up by Europe, like Tunisia and Morocco.
This instability, coupled with the repressive absolutism of Abdul Hamid II, had led to the famous Young Turks revolution, bringing forth the government that would famously later cause the brutal Armenian genocide. After their revolution in 1908, this conflict three years later will be their first major test – in fact they literally hold their first congress at the exact same time the invasion is launched.
Things Go Down
On September 26 the Italians extend an ultimatum to the Ottoman Empire to hand over Libya in a trustee-style relationship like Britain had for Egypt, where the Ottomans were technically in charge on paper but the Europeans called all the shots. Indignity of indignities, the Ottomans said no. The game is on.
The Italians were less prepared than they had hoped due to socialist opposition, but they still started rallying an army of 34,000 to go against the under 5000 Ottoman regulars in Libya. The Ottoman Empire was in a particularly difficult position for shoring up their own position because they had no direct land access to Libya – British Egypt was in between Turkey and Libya and the Anglos refused to allow the Ottomans to move their troops over land. This meant they had to pass through disguised as Arab civilians or advance over sea, but the Italians had significant sea dominance. Mustafa Kemal, the future future leader of the republic of Turkey, has to sneak in on a Russian ship disguised as a journalist. In time the Turkish forces would also grow to includes thousands of Bedouin guerilla fighters.
In the initial phase of the war the Italians basically just sailed up and 1500 sailors took Tripoli in a handful of days. Another 20,000 troops and a few more days and Italy soon had all the other major cities as well: Benghazi, Derna and Tobruk.
On November 5, only a month later, the Italians declare conquest over Libya. They technically only control the coast but it’s not like there’s much inland anyway.
...One Year Later
But things swiftly moved from a more standard war to one of guerilla resistance. Despite holding the population centers, the Italians couldn’t penetrate even a few kilometers in land. Arab cavalry encircled the cities and attacked any soldier who strayed too far, Libyan civilian volunteers attacked troops digging trenches, Bedouins stage sporadic attacks from the desert. It only took a month for Libya to assert control over the major cities but the guerilla resistance proved fierce, a whole year later Italy was still nowhere near pacifying these sporadic attacks. The Italian troops have increased from 34,000 to 140,000.
The other European Empires had greenlit this specifically because they thought it was gonna take, like, a day, and here we are a year later at stalemate. Feeling a little frantic Italy asks for and receives permission from them to expand the naval fight – in August 1912 they begin attacking the Turkish Dodecanese islands. They begin shelling the forts on the Dardanelles themselves, making to slip on through the straits to the Sea of Marmara and attack Constantinople itself. This leads to the panicked Ottomans to close off the straits entirely, stretch steel chains across the opening, and fill the water with mines.
The Balkan Bananza
Suddenly this pointless colonial war has become an existential threat for the Russian Empire. Half of Russian export trade moved through the Dardanelle Straits and promptly dropped by a third; the straights were also their imports access to the components they needed for their heavy industry, which “nearly ground to a halt.” Their balance of payments felt to zero and they began to convene emergency meetings.
Now, while Russia was the protector and sometimes co-agressor of the Balkan states, it didn’t necessarily want them growing too strong or independently sweeping Tsargard Constantinople Istanbul without Russians there. The current Russian position had been that a weak Ottoman Empire could be preferable to none, but suddenly the dangers of a weak Ottoman empire became extremely real. The Balkan nations had been chomping at the bit to attack the Ottomans while they were distracted in Libya, and Russia would hold them back no longer.
In September Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece declare war on the Ottoman Empire and the first Balkan War has begun. All of the difficulties of the Libyan War, such as carefully and secretly moving their troops though Egypt or the Mediterranean, is now doubly difficult for getting those troops back to the Balkans. Stuck on the other side of Egypt Mustafa Kemal is powerless to help as the Balkans raid his hometown. His rage goes stronger.
Unable to fight both fronts simultaneously, In October, the Ottomans ultimately establish an armistice with the Italians and Libya is signed over.
Italian Aftermath
Italy had established themselves as a serious colonial power and had restored Rome’s rule across the mediterranean, but at what cost? Quite a high one actually, with expenses running in 500% of what was estimated, and lasting way longer than expected. In fact, it didn’t end when the Ottomans signed the Treaty– guerrilla resistance continued and was put down brutally over what we politely call the “punitive pacification campaigns,” which lasted all the way til 1931, a full 20 years after the Italians had declared victory.
The expenses of the Libyan pacification left Italy in a poor financial position when World War 1 actually broke out – not to mention that it still had to commit a significant number of troops to the punitive campaigns. To finance the war effort debt quadrupled to about 180% of GDP by the end of the war. The struggles of managing this debt sent the economy into turmoil, discrediting the ruling liberal government, and helping to pave the way for the fascists, who made renegotiating the debt with the US and UK a priority and established some of their early their credibility by doing just that in 1925.
Libya remained an Italian province until their defeat in World War 2.
The European Aftermath
Italian attempts to foster nationalist movements in the Balkans also caught the ire of the Empire of Austro-hungary, which was especially concerned about nationalism in Greece and Serbia. Relationships between the two nations suffered significantly. Though nominally allies, Italy didn’t inform Austria or Germany of the Libyan invasion before beginning it, and when Austro-Hungary issued its ultimatum to Serbia it did not consult Italy, helping to drive the Italians to the entente.
Furthermore, the balance of power was ultimately massively thrown apart by the dissolution of the Ottomans and the birth of the fractious Balkan nation states, whose conflicts of course eventually set the spark that started the fire of ww1.
To quote the Serbian diplomat Miroslav Spalajković on the events that led to the First World War "all subsequent events are nothing more than the evolution of that first [Italian] aggression."
The Ottoman Aftermath
Throughout all this conflict the Ottoman Empire had been wracked by internal instability. The Libyan war threw gas on the fire of this power struggle which saw a 1912 coup and ended with the Young Turks crushing all of their opposition in 1913. The period following is called the age of the three Pashas, so named after the triumvirate of tyrannical leaders who restored absolutism to the Empire and launched the great genocides.
In fact, from the Libyan War onwards the Ottoman Empire is never not at war – they go straight into the First then Second Balkan Wars, then World War 1, then the Greco-Turkic War which only finally ends in 1922. This eleven year stretch of constant battle has been nicknamed the Ottoman War of Succession, as the Empire splintered apart and spewed forth nation states, until it finally became one itself under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal, who first attained his military prestige in where else but the Libyan war.
The term conspiracy theory is wielded as a pejorative, alluding to on-its-face absurdity. But the vocabulary we use has a serious ambiguity problem because conspiracies are not figments of the imagination. There is a tangible and qualitative distinction between plain-vanilla conspiracies (COINTELPRO, Operation Snow White, or the Gunpowder Plot) and their more theatrical cousins (flat earth theory, the moon landing hoax, or the farcical notion that coffee tastes good), yet a clear delineation has been elusive and it's unsatisfying to just assert "this one is crazy, and this one isn't." Both camps involve subterfuge, malevolent intent, covert operations, misinformation, orchestrated deceit, hidden agendas, clandestine networks, and yes, conspiracy, and yet the attempts to differentiate between the two have veered into unsatisfactory or plainly misleading territories.
What I'll argue is the solution boils down to a simple reconfiguration of the definition that captures the essence of the absurdity: conspiracy theories are theories that assume circumstances that render the titular "conspiracy" unnecessary. This is what I'll refer to as the Overkill Conspiracy Hypothesis (OCH). Before we dive into this refinement, it's helpful to explore why traditional distinctions have fallen short.
The section on differences in The People's Pedia showcases some of these misguided attempts. For example, conspiracy theories tend to be in opposition to mainstream consensus but that's a naked appeal to authority — logic that would have tarred the early challengers to the supposed health benignity of smoking as loons. Or that theories portray conspirators acting with extreme malice, but humans can indeed harbor evil intentions (see generally, human history). Another relies on the implausibility of maintaining near-perfect operational security. This is getting better, but while maintaining secrecy is hard, it's definitely not impossible. We have actual, real-life examples of covert military operations, or drug cartels that manage to operate clandestine billion-dollar logistical enterprises.
There's still some useful guidance to draw from the pile of chaff, and that's conspiracy theories' lack of, and resistance to, falsifiability. Despite its unfortunate name, falsifiability is one of my nearest and dearest concepts for navigating the world. Put simply, falsifiability is the ability for a theory to be proven wrong at least hypothetically. The classic example is "I believe all swans are white, but I would change my mind if I saw a black swan". The classic counterexample could be General John DeWitt citing the absence of sabotage by Japanese-Americans during WWII as evidence of future sabotage plans. There is indeed a trend of conspiracy theorists digging into their belief in belief, and dismissing contrary evidence as either fabricated, or (worse) evidence of the conspiracy itself.
I won't talk shit about the falsifiability test; it's really good stuff. But it has limitations. For one, the lack of falsifiability is only a good indication a theory is deficient, not a conclusive determination. There are also practical considerations, like how historical events can be difficult to apply falsifiability because the evidence is incomplete or hopelessly lost, or how insufficient technology in an emerging scientific field can place some falsifiable claims (temporarily, hopefully) beyond scrutiny. So the inability to falsify a theory does not necessarily mean that the theory is bunk.
Beyond those practical limitations, there's also the unfortunate bad actor factor. Theorists with sufficient dishonesty or self-awareness can respond to the existential threat of falsifiability by resorting to vague innuendo to avoid tripping over shoelaces of their own making. Since you can't falsify what isn't firmly posited, they dance around direct assertions, keeping their claims shrouded in a mist of maybe. The only recourse then is going one level higher, and deducing vagueness as a telltale sign of a falsifiability fugitive wherever concrete answers to the who / how / why remain elusive. Applying the vagueness test to the flat earth theory showcases the evasion. It's near-impossible to get any clear answers from proponents: who exactly is behind Big Globe, how did they manage to hoodwink everyone, and why why why why why would anyone devote any effort to this scheme? In contrast, True Conspiracies™ like the atomic spies lack the nebulousness: Soviet Union / covert transmission of nuclear secrets / geopolitical advantage.
Yet the vagueness accusation doesn't apply to all conspiracy theories. The moon landing hoax is surprisingly lucid on this point: NASA / soundstage / geopolitical advantage. And this unveils another defense mechanism against falsification, which is the setting of ridiculously high standards of evidence. Speaking of veils, there's a precedent for this in Islamic law of all places, where convictions for fornication require four eyewitnesses to the same act of intercourse, and only adult male Muslims are deemed competent witnesses. The impossibly stringent standards appear to be in response to the fact that the offense carries the death penalty, and shows it's possible to raise the bar so high that falsifiability is intentionally rendered out of reach.
The moon landing hoax might be subjected to these impossible standards, given that the Apollo 11 landing was meticulously documented over 143 minutes of uninterrupted video footage — a duration too lengthy to fit on a film reel with the technology available at the time. Although only slightly higher than the Lizardman Constant, a surprising 6% of Americans still hold the view that the moon landing was staged. At some point you have to ask how much evidence is enough, but ultimately there's no universally accepted threshold for answering this question.
So falsifiability remains a fantastic tool, but it has legitimate practical limitations, and isn't a conclusive inquiry anyways. Someone's refusal to engage in falsifiability remains excellent evidence they're aware and concerned of subjecting their theory to scrutiny, but their efforts (vagueness or impossible standards) will nevertheless still frustrate a straightforward application of falsifiability. So what's left?
We're finally back again to the Overkill Conspiracy Hypothesis, where the circumstances conspiracy theories must assume also, ironically, render the conspiracy moot. The best way to explain this is by example. Deconstructing a conspiracy theory replicates the thrill of planning a bank heist, so put yourself in the shoes of the unfortunate anonymous bureaucrat tasked with overseeing the moon landing hoax. Remember that the why of the moon landing hoax was to establish geopolitical prestige by having the United States beat the Soviet Union to the lunar chase. So whatever scheme you concoct has to withstand scrutiny from what was, at the time, the most advanced space program employing the greatest space engineers from that half of the world.
The most straightforward countermeasure would be to task already existing NASA engineers to draft up totally fake but absolutely plausible equipment designs. Every single aspect of the entire launch — each rocket, lunar module, ladder, panel, bolt, glove, wrench — would need to be painstakingly fabricated to deceive not just the global audience, but the eagle-eyed experts watching with bated breath from the other side of the Cold War divide. Extend that to all communications, video transmissions, photographs, astronaut testimonies, and 'returned' moon rocks. Each and all of it has to be exhaustively and meticulously examined by dedicated and highly specialized consultants.
But it doesn't stop there, because you also need absolute and perpetual secrecy, as any singular leak would threaten the entire endeavor. The U.S. was well aware Soviet Union spies had successfully snagged closely-guarded nuclear secrets, so whatever countermeasures needed here had to surpass fucking nukes. Like I said before, secrecy is not impossible, just very difficult. I suppose NASA could take a page from the cartels and just institute brutally violent reprisals against any snitches (plus their whole families), but this genre of deterrence can only work if...people know about it. More likely, though, NASA would use the traditional intelligence agency methods of extensive vetting, selective recruitment, and lavish compensation, but now all measures would need to be further amplified to surpass the protective measures around nuclear secrets.
We're talking screening hundreds or thousands of individuals more rigorously than for nuclear secrets, alongside an expanding surveillance apparatus to keep everyone in line. How much do you need to increase NASA's budget (10x? 100x?) to devote toward a risky gambit that, if exposed, would be history's forever laughingstock? If such vast treasuries are already at disposal, it starts to seem easier to just...go to the moon for real.
OCH® has several benefits. It starts by not challenging any conspiracy theorist's premises. It accepts it as given that there is indeed a sufficiently motivated shadowy cabal, and just runs with it. This sidesteps any of the aforementioned concerns about falsifiability fugitives, and still provides a useful rubric for distinguishing plain-vanilla conspiracies from their black sheep brethren.
If we apply OCH to the atomic spies, we can see the theory behind that conspiracy requires no overkill assumptions. The Soviet Union did not have nukes, they wanted nukes, and stealing someone else's blueprints is definitely much easier than developing your own in-house. The necessary assumption (the Soviet Union has an effective espionage program) does not negate the need for the conspiracy.
Contrast that with something like the Sandy Hook hoax, which posits the school shooting as a false flag operation orchestrated by the government to pass restrictive gun laws (or something; see the vagueness section above). Setting aside the fact that no significant firearm legislation actually resulted, the hoax and the hundreds of crisis actors it would have required would have necessitated thousands of auditions, along with all the secrecy hurdles previously discussed. And again, if the government already has access to this mountain of resources, it seems like there are far more efficient methods of spending it (like maybe giving every congressman some gold bars) rather than orchestrating an attack and then hoping the right laws get passed afterward.
It's also beguiling to wonder exactly why the shadowy cabal would even need to orchestrate a fake mass shooting, given the fact that they already regularly happen! Even if the cabal wanted to instigate a slaughter (for whatever reason), the far, far, far simpler method is to just identify the loner incel kid and prod them into committing an actual mass shooting. We've already stipulated the cabal does not care about dead kids. Similarly, if the U.S. wanted to orchestrate the 9/11 attacks as a prelude to global war, it seems far easier to load up an actual plane full of actual explosives and just actually launch it at the actual buildings, rather than to spend the weeks or months to surreptitiously sneak in however many tons of thermite into the World Trade Center (while also coordinating the schedule with the plane impact, for some reason).
Examining other examples of Verified Conspiracies demonstrate how none of them harbor overkill assumptions that render the conspiratorial endeavors moot. In the Watergate scandal, the motive was to gain political advantage by spying on adversaries, and the conspirators did so through simple breaking and entering. No assumptions are required about the capabilities of President Nixon's security entourage that would have rendered the trespass unnecessary. Even something with the scope of Operation Snow White — which remains one of the largest infiltrations of the U.S. government, involving up to 5,000 agents — fits. The fact that they had access to thousands of covert agents isn't overkill, because the agents still needed to infiltrate government agencies to gain access to the documents they wanted destroyed. The assumptions do not belie the need for the conspiracy.
I hold no delusions that I can convince people wedded to their conspiracy theory of their missteps. I don't claim to have any idea how people fall prey to this kind of unfalsifiable absurdist thinking. But at least for the rest of us, it will remain useful to be able to draw a stark distinction between the real and the kooky. Maybe after that we can unearth some answers.
—sent from my lunar module
Happy 20 TTs guys.
I’ll be trying something new with this one and changing the format so the top level post only contains an explanation of the thread, like we do with Wellness Wednesdays and Fun Fridays. The country-specific coverage will be placed in separate comments where people can respond to them directly, or start their own threads as separate comments. This is part of my hope that long term this will become more of a permanent thread that sustains beyond me, because I likely won’t be around long term. In the short term as well, I’ve been trying to produce a lot of the user content but there will be weeks where I'm too busy, and it would be nice to have a stickied thread where people who want to can still chat foreign policy without me.
So:
This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from a mix of countries I follow personally and countries I think the forum might be interested in. In the past I've noticed good results from covering countries that users here live in, and having them chime in with more comprehensive responses. In that spirit I'll probably try to offer more snippets of western news (but you'll still get a lot of the global south). I don't follow present day European politics all that much so you'll have to fill in the blanks for me.
But also, no need to use the prompts here, feel free to talk about completely unmentioned countries, or skip country coverage entirely and chat about ongoing dynamics like wars or trade deals. You can even skip the present day and talk about IR history, or just whatever you’re reading at the moment - consider it very free form and open to everyone.
This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
I.
Profile of Patric Gagne, sociopath. Caucasian, 48, married, two children, dirty blonde hair. Occupation: therapist, writer. What makes one a sociopath?
Traits may include lack of remorse, deceitfulness and a disregard for the feelings of others as well as right and wrong.
Sounds pretty bad.
But that only tells part of the story. The part that’s missing is you can be a sociopath and have a healthy relationship. You can be a sociopath and be educated. That’s a very uncomfortable reality for some people. People want to believe that all sociopaths are monsters and that all monsters are easy to spot.
I’m relieved sociopaths can still get degrees. What’s the subjective experience like?
Just because I don’t care about someone else’s pain, so to speak, doesn’t mean I want to cause more of it. I enjoy living in this society. I understand that there are rules. I choose to follow those rules because I understand the benefits of this world, this house where I get to live, this relationship I get to have. That is different from people who follow the rules because they have to, they should, they want to be a good person. None of those apply to me. I want to live in a world where things function properly. If I create messes, my life will become messy. I think [transgression] feels good because it feels free. To do something bad, it’s like, I don’t give a [expletive]. The consequences — be it internal guilt or getting thrown in jail — happen after. In this moment, I’m going to do this because it feels [expletive] great to just not care. That is what the sociopath experience is almost all the time.
II.
Lately I keep hearing about ethically questionable things my acquaintances do. Examples:
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Driving in the bus lane to beat traffic.
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Buying 5 TVs to take advantage of a sale, then returning four of them immediately.
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Buying furniture from IKEA, using it, then returning it before the 180 day policy expires.
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Using the carpool lane when driving alone.
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Avoiding road tolls with illicit methods.
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Raiding the office snack room and hoarding the best snacks for themselves, or even stocking their pantry at home.
I’m not going to browbeat these people to get them to admit that this stuff is wrong and antisocial. It’s not exactly the crime of the century. Depending on how well I know the person, sometimes I gently ask them why they think this is acceptable. The responses I get range from non-sequitur rationalizations (“I overpaid my taxes, why should I pay bridge tolls?”) to rules-lawyering (“if it’s not forbidden, why shouldn’t I?”) to blackpills (“it’s like India here, every man for himself”) to blank stares and changes of topic.
The people I’m talking about are high functioning. They have careers, relationships, educations. They make good money. The sociopath at least understands that there are rules that have to be followed, but Gagne’s understanding of “neurotypicals” doesn’t match what I see (maybe I don’t know enough affluent white female liberals?). I see people who see no connection at all between rules and benefits. I see people who don’t feel that they have to follow the rules, or even that being a good person entails following the rules. I see people who will do just about anything that gets them ahead if they can’t immediately see the harm. The notion that actions may have diffuse costs, that abusing policies makes things worse for people who follow the rules, that your coworkers might want to eat those snacks, is the furthest thing from their mind. They view these considerations with something between ignorance and contempt - you’re just a sucker if you aren’t looking out for #1.
But sociopaths use it out of necessity, and that’s a really important distinction. My decision to mask [adopting prosocial mannerisms] is not because I have some dark ulterior motive. It’s because you guys are interesting to me. Neurotypical emotions are so colorful and complex. In order for me to engage with you, you have to feel comfortable with me. In order for you to feel comfortable with me, I have to mask. I find that people are unnerved by me when I’m not masking… The bottom line is that I want you to feel comfortable, so I engage. I smile. I mirror. It’s not nefarious; it’s necessary.
Has it always been this way? I am not sure. I think that things have gotten worse. It seems that more people are adopting the perspective that they should just loot all the value they can out of the systems around them, systems that aren’t perfect (why do we W-2 employees need to jump through these tax hoops again?) but make our way of life possible. Burning trust and social capital by mainlining the remorseless sociopathic experience is not long-term sustainable. The people are the same as they used to be, but the mask is slipping, whether that means there’s more of this behavior or people feel emboldened to speak out about it.
III.
Borges wrote a meta-fictional review of a book about how a knave got a glimpse of preternatural goodness in some scum-of-the-earth son-of-a-bitch and realized that he must have witnessed a glimpse, a shard of a great man.
All at once - with the miraculous consternation of Robinson Crusoe faced with the human footprint in the sand - he perceives some mitigation in this infamy: a tenderness, an exaltation, a silence in one of the abhorrent men. "It was asif a more complex interlocutor had joined the dialogue." He knows that the vile man conversing with him is incapable of this momentaneous decorum; from this fact he concludes that the other, for the moment, is the reflection of a friend, or of the friend of a friend. Rethinking the problem he arrives at a mysterious conviction:some place in the world there is a man from whom this clarity emanates; some place in the world there is a man who is this clarity. The student resolves to dedicate his life to finding him.
Even a man of the ‘vilest class’ can reflect a kind of holiness. Isn’t it possible that the mild-mannered white collar transgressors around me are reflecting a kind of damnation? Did these small-time bastards pick up their tendencies from some glancing contact, a ‘faint trace’ of a scowl or word in someone more pathological?
Gagne again:
I think, inherently, neurotypicals are fascinated by sociopathy because it’s a relatable disorder. Everybody has that darkness in them. Everybody has those thoughts that they shoo away because of guilt. If more conversations between neurotypical and so-called neurodivergents were to occur, it would benefit both… I was sitting across from a man at a dinner party — this was like two years ago — and my diagnosis came up, and 30 seconds afterward he said, “You know, I have thoughts of killing my wife a lot.” Not to normalize that, but I was like, Tell me about that. And he goes: “I’ve really thought about it. I’ve reached out to people about hiring somebody to kill her.”
“The line separating good and evil passes… through every human heart.” There has to be a way to beat back the darkness and grow the ‘bridgehead of good.’ To refuse to reflect the damned darkness of the guiltless sociopathic id, in ways big and small.
But as for myself, with no clear villains to tilt with, perhaps the best I can do is to keep my mouth shut. Borges has the last word:
After rereading, I am apprehensive lest I have not sufficiently underlined the book's virtues. It contains some very civilized expressions: for example, a certain argument in the nineteenth chapter in which one feels a presentiment that one of the antagonistsis a friend of Al-Mu'tasim when he will not refute the sophisms of his opponent "so as not to be right in a triumphal fashion."
Argentina
Turbo-libertarian Javier Milei has gotten into some trouble for his running mate Victoria Villarruel, who has been a long time apologist for Argentina’s Dirty War and as a lawyer defended officers accused of crimes against humanity. She claims the mass disappearances were understandable and necessary to defeat leftist terrorists (who had mostly been extinguished by the time Videla took power in 76 near the very beginning of this era of state terrorism). This has understandably drawn the ire of Argentina’s human rights organizations and isn’t just an issue of the past - if Milei wins she will be in charge of the police and armed forces.
Separately the Economist wrote a rather scathing article arguing that the IMF had been radically lowering its lending standards to put up with Argentina’s endless monetary mismanagement. At the rate they’re heading, no matter who wins the election it may be too late to save the currency crisis.
The United Kingdom
Politico reports on leadership difficulties in Britain. The Tories have been receiving a drubbing in the polls, recently lost two by elections, and apparently concluded a ministerial reshuffle without generating much excitement. All this is a challenge for PM Sunak and doesn’t reflect well on next year’s election:
Sunak’s supporters are keen to highlight that he’s chalked up some big wins since taking office less than a year ago. He produced a solution to the Northern Ireland trade deadlock, started to carve out a new image for Britain on the international stage, presided over slowing inflation, and passed a flagship bill aimed at cutting undocumented migration. But these limited successes just may not cut it for voters. Two-thirds of people think Sunak has achieved “only a slight amount” or nothing at all in his premiership so far, according to polling for POLITICO by PR firm Redfield and Wilton.
Speaking of leadership woes, following Nicola Sturgeon’s exit and SNP’s ongoing scandals, much of the oomph seems to have been taken out of the independence movement:
A recent Survation poll suggested the SNP could lose almost half the 48 seats it won at the 2019 Westminster election, with Labour picking up 24 — a dramatic improvement on opposition leader Keir Starmer’s current total of one, and a major boost to his hopes of entering Downing Street at next year’s general election.
I’m not really a Britain watcher and I know we have a fair amount of users who are so input would definitely be appreciated.
Spain
The left and right remain in deadlock in Spain’s never ending post election hangover. The conservatives were the frontrunner in votes and their leader Feijoo is currently attempting unsuccessfully to form a party. Feijoo actually proposed to the Socialist party that they collaborate on legislation if they allow him to come to power, which the socialists of course rejected.
Currently they still hold the top chance at winning a third party to their coalition because the third parties are mostly regional outright or quasi independence movements that are incompatible with a more nationalist coalition. However, the Catalan party Junts has now formally outlined their demands to support the left. They will require full amnesty for their leader Carles Puigdemon, who is in exile following the illegal Catalan independence referendum. Until now this has been a nonstarter for leftist PM Pedro Sanchez and Junts have already said they won’t accept an exchange of amnesty for police officers accused of brutality in the wake of the referendum, which has been thus far the only idea proposed to sweeten the hard-to-swallow demand.
Thailand
To summarize the mess so far, two anti-military, anti-monarchy parties were big winners in the last election. One of them was more genuinely radical / progressive, the other was kind of the family party of the last two leaders that the military coup’d. For understandable reasons the latter party, Pheu Thai, were at first seen as a more serious enemy, and their incredibly popular shadow leader Thaksin Shinawatra has been exiled since the his 2014 coup.
However, the more radical (and popular) Move Forward party came to be seen as a more serious threat to the military-monarchy rule so the powers that be blocked them, and ended up coalitioning with Pheu Thai and let them pick a palatable, non-military PM in exchange for Thaksin being allowed to return. The King has now formally pardoned almost all of Thaskin’s sentence.
There are two ways to look at the conclusion to this saga. One is that populist forces have become so powerful that the military was forced on its back legs to sacrifice some power and even ally with their old enemy. The other is that the military has so skillfully entrenched their power that they have co-opted their historical enemy as an ally and handily crushed their only real threat. I tend to lean towards the latter explanation but you can differ.
Separately, I have previously used Thailand as an example arguing against people who think American foreign policy is guided by an urge to push progressivism everywhere. The Thai military basically just steamrolled a progressive democratic movement and we didn’t say anything, because what we really care about is whether they’ll lean towards us or China. At the time I argued it was very unlikely that Thailand made their move without letting the US know first, and that we should expect to see our countries grow closer, not farther apart following this arc. Early signs of this shift, the Thai PM has said he will also skip ASEAN and use that time to hold security talks with the United States.
I’ve been covering this election saga for a while and now that it’s basically concluded I probably won’t update on Thailand too often, unless they do something crazy (which they well might!) so thanks for following this with me.
Gabon
After Gabon’s coup against the re-elected Ali Bongo, General Brice Oligui Nguema has risen to power as the new “interim” president. While on the surface this is the end of the 56 years of rule by the Bongo family, Nguema is actually cousins with President Bongo, leading the opposition leader to accuse the whole thing of being a sham to keep the family in power. Either way, the General has his work cut out for him:
The freeze on hiring since 2018 and the suspension of a salary before the civil servants are given a posting are just two issues that have made the job more precarious, unionist Sima Bertin says.
"Three major issues come immediately come to mind. First, the administrative situations of teachers must be regularized. The second is the regularization of their financial situation, including the payment of arrears. Last but not least, the pension should be indexed to the teachers' remuneration systems',' the Syndicat de l’éducation nationale member listed.
Nguema has promised to return the country to civilian control with free and fair elections but, uh, no timeline yet. Rwanda and Cameroon have responded to the coup by reshuffling their own defense forces and seem to be wary of more instability spreading.
Slovakia
Slovakia will have a parliamentary election on September 30th. This is earlier than normal because the last election was only in 2020, which saw the rise of the anti-corruption populist Igor Matovič, who proceeded to mismanage things so badly that he is apparently now the most distrusted politician in Slovakia with various polls showing 88% to 91% of the population rating him as distrustful. He was succeeded by Eduard Heger who struggled to maintain momentum through stillwater budget negotiations and ultimately lost a vote of no confidence in December, leading to a vote in January to reform the constitution to allow for early elections.
Right now the previous leader of the left wing coalition, SD, is in first place, trailed by a progressive party likely willing to coalition with them, and trailed comfortably by everyone else.
China
China’s second largest real estate giant after Evergrande, Country Garden, may default on their debts as well, turning a bad real estate -driven recession even worse.
This came as the crisis-hit company reported a record $6.7bn (£5.2bn) loss for the first six months of the year…
Country Garden also announced it had missed interest payments on bonds that were due this month. However, it added it was still within a 30-day grace period to make the payments.
It is also reportedly seeking to extend a deadline for the repayment of another bond…
Problems in China's property market - which includes everything from building homes to industries making the goods that go in them - is having a major impact as it accounts for around a third of the economy.
China's real estate industry was rocked when new rules to control the amount of money big real estate firms could borrow were introduced in 2020.
Evergrande, which was once China's top-selling developer, racked up debts of more than $300bn as it expanded aggressively to become one of the country's biggest companies.
Its financial problems have rippled through the country's property industry, with a series of other developers defaulting on their debts and leaving unfinished building projects across the country.
BBC adds more detail in a small retrospective:
The country's astonishing growth in the past 30 years was propelled by building: everything from roads, bridges and train lines to factories, airports and houses. It is the responsibility of local governments to carry this out.
However, some economists argue this approach is starting to run out of road, figuratively and literally.
One of the more bizarre examples of China's addiction to building can be found in Yunnan province, near the border with Myanmar. This year, officials there bafflingly confirmed they would go ahead with plans to build a new multi-million dollar Covid-19 quarantine facility.
Heavily indebted local governments are under so much pressure that this year some were reportedly found to be selling land to themselves to fund building programmes.
On the other hand, a series of articles seems to be praising Hauwei’s advances in the just released chip, in spite of sanctions:
Jefferies analysts said TechInsights' findings could trigger a probe from the U.S. Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security, create more debate in the U.S. about the effectiveness of sanctions and prompt the Congress to include even harsher tech sanctions in a competition bill it is preparing against China.
It's a book review submitted to Scott Alexander's blog for his book review contest(not by me, I just enjoyed reading it). It a summary of an Icelandic Saga that's half-fable, half-historical record of a series of legal proceedings in medieval Iceland, and how society that teeters between civilization and barbarism.
Scott has posted a discussion of the conversation about eugenics, framed as an actual conversation. I found it thought-provoking, as he made better arguments for both sides than I am used to seeing from either.
A: Given that mild, consensual forms of eugenics have historically led to extreme, horrifying versions, we have reason to believe the topic is a slippery slope which ought to be avoided outright.
B: This proves too much, as there are plenty of other ideas with similar history but much higher body counts. Thus eugenics ought to be carefully investigated rather than tabooed outright.
In the footnotes, he also presents C: Ehrlich did nothing wrong, and sometimes expected-value calculations don’t plan for the long tails. Democracy, as a form of distributed consent, is our best way to square this circle. This (correctly, IMO) leaves Scott uncomfortable. I appreciate that he included it.
I was not at all familiar with Ehrlich’s work, or with the quintessentially-McNamara history of Indian aid programs. Both add some valuable context for the argument. Oh, and I guess Scott talks about HBD a little bit; that’ll be catnip for this community, but it’s really secondary to the main thrust. Seriously, just read the article for a better version than anything I can write.
Discuss.
This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful. Here we go:
Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
Contributions for the week of April 3, 2023
Recognition Diplomacy
Contributions for the week of April 10, 2023
Transitive Reasoning
Contributions for the week of April 17, 2023
Identity Politics
Contributions for the week of April 24, 2023
- "What is going in Sudan is a practical demonstration that being a global power does not mean that everything going on in the world is secretly about you."
Discriminating Taste
1 Introduction
In the Small-scale Questions thread, @TheDag asked:
[H]ow do you handle the paradox of belief? [...] The 'logical' part of my brain relentlessly attacks what it sees as the foolishness of religion, ritual and sacrament. And yet, when I partake and do my best to take it seriously, I feel healed. [...] How do you make sense of a serious religious practice, while keeping the ability to be seriously rational?
This post is my attempt to answer that question.
My apologies in advance for any first-draft typos or errors.
I am an Orthodox Christian -- a convert to Orthodoxy, but not to Christianity in general. I've been reading material from LessWrong/SSC/ACX for about 10 years now, but never considered myself a Rationalist, in large part because of the movement's basically-axiomatic rejection of anything not comporting with a materialist metaphysics. Nevertheless, I'm a natural skeptic and a mathematician by training, and I think I understand, at a visceral level, what TheDag is talking about.
This post is not intended to be an apologia for Religion, Theism, or Orthodox Christianity in particular. Instead, it is an outline of my way of thinking about Reason and Christianity, and why I think that (some forms of) religion -- yes, serious, supernaturalist, actually-believe-the-creeds Christianity complete with ritual and sacraments (in fact, especially that kind) -- is fully compatible with being rational; at least, as rational as we can reasonably expect to be.
Small disclaimer: I'm going to use Christianity, and (sometimes) Orthodox Christianity in particular, as my source of examples/topic of discussion. I (a) do not guarantee that everything I say will be precisely correct Orthodox doctrine (I'm doing my best but I'm not getting feedback from a committee of bishops and theologians) and (b) don't know how applicable this all is outside of Christianity. (It would be kind of weird if I thought that Christianity and other religions were in exactly the same position, since I think Orthodox Christianity is true and other religions varying degrees of less-than-true.)
2 The Goals of Rationality
Why does anyone care about being rational in the first place? The usual answer, which in my opinion is basically correct, is that there are two reasons:
- Because it helps you to believe true things rather than false things. ("Epistemic Rationality")
- Because it helps you make better choices. ("Instrumental Rationality")
Note that these goals are just that -- goals. There's no law of the universe (at least, there's no non-circular argument) that a particular "Rational" way of thinking will always be the best way to achieve those goals. A particular set of scientific, logical, and probabilistic methods seem to be pretty good, overall, and certainly excel in some domains, but in principal these are secondary to the above goals. Do you want to believe true things and live well, or do you want to Be Rational? Obviously the first, right?
Well...
There's another kind of reason to want to be rational. Maybe you have a skeptical temperament, and have an internal demand for a certain sort of rigor. Or maybe you have developed a kind of self-identification as a Rational Person, which has attached itself to a certain set of assumptions and ways of thinking. Or maybe you like to think of yourself as Intelligent and Rational, and there's this bunch of intelligent people you know, and they all say that thinking in a certain way, and believing in a certain set of axioms, is a prerequisite to being Intelligent and Rational, and theism and rituals and faith and religion is just Dumb Stuff for Irrational People and you don't want to be Dumb and Irrational, right?
(It should go without saying that this is a general You, not about TheDag in particular, but here I am saying it anyway.)
The important thing here is that these temperamental, identity-based, and social reasons for wanting to Be Rational are not, themselves, rational or virtuous. If it's the identity or social reasons that have got you, all I can say is that the faster you admit it to yourself and work on getting rid of them, the better.
But perhaps your troubles are in part due to a skeptical temperament, whether natural or trained, or with a difficulty believing that doing and thinking in ways that are not Rational could possibly lead to believing true things or living well.
In that case, the rest of this essay is for you.
3 Ontology
Some people are Christians because they trust authority figures who tell them it's true. Others are Christian because they believe they've witnessed an inexplicable miracle. There's nothing wrong with these people; many of them are better people than I am; but they are not me.
I am a Christian because of the Hard Problem of Consciousness.
Okay, maybe that's a bit too glib, so let me expand a bit. There is a fundamental mystery of how consciousness can exist in a purely material universe. I don't mean that it's a mystery how something could exhibit intelligent behavior, or have some sort of internal model of the world that contains itself. I mean that the existence of a first-person perspective, of there being an I that sees from my eyes and thinks my thoughts, of there being a quality to experience -- all things that we take for granted -- seem impossible in a materialist ontology. The usual materialist takes either handwave the problem away, or else (inexplicably to me) bite the bullet and deny the existence of the conscious self at all.
Even so, I exist.
Lest I digress into the apologia which I did not intend to write, let me just make my main point here: the existence of a first-person perspective not only reveals materialism to be a premise rather than a conclusion, it poses a problem for the universal applicability of rationality, because while the first person perspective is a universal and undeniable fact, even the best thinkers cannot seem to articulate what, exactly, it is, or delineate it to the point of being able to reason clearly about it -- which is why we see the problem being dismissed as just muddled thinking by others.
My other point in bringing this up is as a segue into talking about exactly how deeply the Theist (or at least, Christian) ontology differs from the Materialist one. A lot of people have this unspoken idea that Christian ontology is essentially the same as materialist ontology, except that there is are extra entities which maybe don't follow the laws of physics, and one of them is "omnipotent" (whatever that means, maybe power level = infinity or something), and we call that one "God".
This is not the Christian ontology.
The actual Christian ontology is something more like this: The fundamental nature of reality does not look like atoms and the void, governed by laws of physics. Rather, the fundamental nature of reality is something which is in most respects unimaginable, but in which what we call personhood and will and morality and love and reason are fundamental attributes. This is God -- not another entity like a star or a chair or a cat or a human, only immaterial and superpowered, but rather, the Person at the heart of all reality, in virtue of which everything that exists (including, of course, the entire material universe and all its physical laws), exists.
This is so fundamentally difficult to get one's mind around that people resort to paradoxes to talk about it: We call God "The Existing One", and yet some Christian theologians have said things like "God is not a being" -- not because they think that God is just some idea, but because our notion of "existence" or "being" imports the idea of a separate entity within the universe, and is insufficient to what -- who -- God is. (More on this in the next section.)
This ontology is probably shocking to people whose habitual assumptions are materialist -- which is true of most people, let alone Rationalists. So they round off theistic claims, in their head, to something like "Superpowered Invisible Man". This concept is, from the Christian perspective, nearer to the truth than pure materialism, but -- the skeptics are right on this one -- being materialist-except-for-this-one-superpowered-dude is not very rational.
But within the ontology I've outlined, Christian beliefs about the world make reasonable sense -- I would say they are rational, not in the sense of being obviously inevitable or circumscribed by reason, but in that they don't pose any problem for a rational person who recognizes his limits and is content with partial understanding.
4 Cataphasis and Apophasis
When people talk about paradoxes in Christianity, they generally mean one of four things:
- Doctrines, like the Trinity, which refer to concepts that our minds have a difficult time comprehending, because they are so different from our usual experience and categories.
- Counterintuitive truths, expressed in apparently-contradictory language in order to draw attention.
- Deliberate paradox in the form of Apophatic theology, meant to explode misconceptions about God and emphasize our inability to comprehend His fundamental nature.
- Multiple ways of talking about the same topic that seem to be inconsistent.
Of the second I will have nothing further to say; it is clearly not a problem for rational thinking. Of the first, I want to emphasize that the apparent paradox is due to our inability to understand the concepts involved and nothing more, much like how arithmetic on infinite cardinal numbers is not a "real" paradox just because it doesn't behave like arithmetic on the integers. ("But I understand cardinal arithmetic, down to how it is a consequence of ZFC! If nobody understands the Trinity fully, how could it be reasonable to believe it?" More on that later.)
So let's talk about the third and fourth.
A number of foundational Christian thinkers have divided theology into two parts: Cataphatic, or positive, theology, and Apophatic or negative, theology. Cataphatic theology is what is at play when one says things like "God loves", or "God is merciful", or "God is just"; or that which is expressed in creeds and dogmas. Cataphatic theology is saying the things that we know about God. Apophatic theology is an approach in which, rather than making positive statements about God, we make negative statements about what God is not. (For some easy examples: "God is not material", "God does not have a cause outside Himself".)
Apophasis often takes the form of paradox when juxtaposed with cataphatic statements, because, first, our concepts which are employed in cataphatic statements will smuggle in implications or impressions which are not true, and second, because this paradox emphasizes our inability to comprehend the full truth about God. I mentioned the apophatic "God is not a being" above, for instance, which seems to contradict theism, but actually the point is that our notion of "being" or "existence" is not really applicable to God.
One might think of apophatic theology's relationship to cataphatic theology as trying to help us understand the "map" of cataphatic doctrine as a guide to the "territory" of who God is and how we relate to God, by continually pulling our attention to the fact that the map is not the territory. This isn't irrational paradox at all, but our continual reminder that the person at the center of reality is not something we can really get our minds around, and we're better off not imagining that we can.
(Digression: Apophatic theology is not unique to Christianity; there is something very similar in Neoplatonism as well as, I think, in Taoism ("The Tao which can be spoken is not the true Tao.").)
Finally, the fourth kind of paradox. It is much like the third, except that multiple counterbalancing positive statements are made, each pointing to part of a truth which is too difficult for us to really get our heads around. Now of course it is possible to excuse nonsense as "just different aspects of an incomprehensible truth," but the thing can really happen as well as being faked.
Let's take an example: What's the deal with sin? Why is it bad for me to sin? (other than it being bad for the people I harm)? The following answers are all defensible from both the Bible and Christian Tradition:
- Sin is breaking God's rules. It makes God angry, and He will punish you for it. (BUT: Doesn't the Bible also say that God hates no one and is quick to forgive?)
- Sin is bad because it's foolish, and tends to lead to bad natural consequences: material, psychological, or social. (BUT: People who do bad things often end up ahead.)
- Sin is like a progressive illness; if you sin, you get sicker, and eventually you'll be miserable (unless you get cured). (BUT: where's the will and personal guilt in all this? And why do I need to consent to being cured?)
- Sin separates you from God, and the absence of God's love ends up in misery. (BUT: How can anyone be separated from God and God's love, if God is everywhere and in everything, and loves everyone?)
- Sin breaks your relationship with God (BUT: a human's relationship with God is only similar by analogy to our relationship with other humans, and how could this be broken, since God doesn't get emotional baggage like humans do?)
- Sinning makes you into the sort of person that finds the presence of God intolerable. (BUT: how does that even work?)
(I probably left some out.) For what it's worth, I -- and many Orthodox theologians -- think the last one is probably closest to the truth, but in some ways it's the least actionable. What we get is all of them: partly because each of them is the right model for some occasions, and we, being unable to really understand the underlying reality, need a multiplicity of models for different circumstances. "All models are wrong, but some are useful," indeed.
5 Those Who Have Not Seen and Yet Have Believed
This section title refers, of course, to Jesus's words to the Apostle Thomas -- after the resurrection, Jesus appears to the Apostles, but for some reason, Thomas isn't with them. The rest tell Thomas, but he -- being a bit of a skeptic -- refuses to believe unless he can verify it for himself (down to unfakeable physical proof). Later, Jesus appears to all of them, offers that proof to Thomas -- and then gives a blessing to "those who have not seen and yet have believed".
There is an epistemic issue -- two, maybe -- that a lot of rational/skeptical people have with Christianity, and it's this. A lot of Christian doctrine contains claims that cannot be verified by anyone alive today (e.g the Crucifixion and Resurrection), or even could not have been directly verified by human observation at all (e.g. the Trinity).
The first is not, in principle, a problem. Everyone believes lots of things they can't verify, even things that nobody can verify now (historical events, e.g.), because they trust in the body of people who did observe those things and those who have passed on the report. They are not wrong to do so! Very little can be empirically verified by an individual. So part of the question, then, is how trustworthy are the people who reported and passed down these events? Since this is not an apologia I won't get into the weeds here (and also I'm not really an expert), so I'll just say that I think a good case can be made that the answer is "Pretty darned trustworthy, all things considered". Still, some of the claims made are pretty wild (cf Resurrection) if you haven't already accepted the overall metaphysics, so skepticism is understandable.
The second is more of a problem. How can anyone, no matter how honest or intelligent, come to know something like the doctrine of the Trinity, which is (a) something that can't be (physically) observed, and (b) admittedly not fully comprehensible by anyone? Christianity, of course, has an answer: it was revealed by God -- through the words of prophets, or Jesus, or by a revelation given to some of the Apostles. That's an explanation, but it has one problem: it does not bridge the epistemic gap for those who don't already broadly accept Christianity.
Here's the thing: this is fine. Nobody should be asked to accept these things just on the say-so of people they aren't sure they can trust. It is not rational to do so, but it's also not necessary. There are good ways to bridge that gap, such that blind belief is not required.
Roughly, it works like this: you get good evidence, of some sort, that at least some of the claims are true. Since all these claims are coming from the same source, they are tied together -- belief in one should increase your estimation that the source is a good one, and thus that the others, which you can't verify, are true as well. Coming to believe in the others to an extent, you see how they fit together (and/or find that believing other claims has good results). At some point a threshold is passed, and you believe not in the truth of this or that statement, but in the whole edifice, even those parts you don't understand (yet), because, as Chesterton put it, you find that Christianity is a truth-telling thing.
Talk to most thoughtful Christians, including many converts, and you'll find that something like this is the process. Maybe they have, like me, some deep philosophical convictions that turn out to be elucidated best by Christian doctrine. Maybe they had an experience that, while maybe not communicable to others, they feel they had no choice but to accept as miraculous, and which pointed them in that direction. Maybe they just found that acting as though the doctrines are true had good results for them that they did not find elsewhere.
As an exercise, I invite you to think about why, from the Orthodox Christian perspective, correct doctrine is so important. It's not because the beliefs, in themselves, are going to save someone ("Even the demons believe -- and tremble!"), nor the converse, that one cannot be saved without specific beliefs (see: the many saints who made errors or lacked knowledge, or the fact that the Church believes that children and idiots can be saved). It's not an arbitrary test, either. Rather, the Church believes that knowing certain truths about God and Humanity's relationship to God helps you, because God is real, and believing true things makes it is easier to be aligned to that reality, which is the real goal.
[ I ran out of characters, so the rest will be in a reply to this post.]
This is part 2 my series where I describe pet peeves of mine that make me distrust a piece of media. Part 1 can be found here. There are some patterns in media that I can’t help but see as red flags. These patterns trigger my instinct to distrust what I’m reading.
Pet Peeve #2: The Number Zero
You might have see the following infographic a few years ago, or something like it:
This infographic lists the annual deaths associated with multiple drugs. Tobacco is at the very top with about 400,000 deaths annually, and Marijuana is at the bottom with 0 annual deaths. It even lists deaths from what we consider to be safe drugs, including 2000 deaths from caffeine, and 500 deaths from aspirin. At the very bottom of the list is Marijuana, which is listed at 0 deaths.
You might have heard that you can't die from an overdose on THC, which the active ingredient in marijuana. This is essentially true. There have been some rare reports of death from apparent THC overdose, but whether or not THC is to blame is almost always contested. One such example occurred when a coroner couldn't find any explanation other than THC for a woman's death.
St. John the Baptist Parish Coroner Christy Montegut said last week that toxicology results for a 39-year-old LaPlace woman who died in February showed that she was killed by an excess amount of THC, the main active ingredient in marijuana.
“It looked like it was all THC because her autopsy showed no physical disease or afflictions that were the cause of death. There was nothing else identified in the toxicology — no other drugs, no alcohol,” Montegut said. “There was nothing else.”
The woman's name was not released.
Montegut, who has served as the St. John coroner since 1988, believes this could be an index case in medicine, perhaps the first death on record solely as a result of THC exposure.
Some drug researchers and experts are skeptical.
Keith Humphreys, a former senior policy adviser at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, said that with the vast amounts of marijuana consumed in the U.S. every year, it's hard to imagine that more overdose deaths wouldn't be occurring if THC was toxic at consumable levels.
“We know from really good survey data that Americans use cannabis products billions of times a year, collectively. Not millions of times, but billions of times a year,” said Humphreys. “So, that means that if the risk of death was one in a million, we would have a couple thousand cannabis overdose deaths a year.”
Humphreys also said it's not uncommon for coroners to see a drug in the system, with no other sign for what might have caused an event leading to death, and so conclude that the drug was the cause.
So while it’s a bit contested, it is at least fair to say that there are 0 deaths from marijuana overdose. However, this infographic is about more than just overdose deaths. Most of the 400,000 deaths from tobacco aren’t from literal nicotine overdose. Most deaths from tobacco come from breathing in tar and other chemicals, which lead to long-term health problems, which reduce lifespan. Marijuana smoke has many of the same chemicals as cigarette smoke, and it also has more tar. Most of the 100,000 alcohol deaths also are not overdose. Only about 2200 of those deaths are from overdose. The rest are from long-term health effects and from accidents. I’m not sure where the 2000 caffeine deaths come from. As far as I can tell, there are only 92 deaths from Caffeine, ever. If anyone knows where that 2000 figure might come from, leave a comment down below. I’d love to see it.
When I see this infographic, I get a strong sense that the creator took the fact that you can’t die from marijuana overdose, and assumed that the annual deaths from marijuana can't possibly be anything except 0. It makes me think that they didn’t bother to check, especially not for deaths related to the tar and chemicals in marijuana smoke.
This is what I usually think when I see the number zero where a zero is not obvious. I assume by default that the creator of the work didn’t actually check the figure, and just assumed that it must be zero. It’s especially suspicious when there’s a reason to expect a non-zero figure to be there. In this case you might expect at least a few deaths due to the lung problems that marijuana causes.
It’s even more suspicious when the creator is clearly biased in favor of listing a low number like 0. We can tell that the creator of this infographic is biased because there’s a marijuana plant in the background, and because the line for marijuana is listed, in a bigger, differently colored font. It is explicitly a pro-marijuana piece.
Now I’ve been in favor of marijuana legalization for a long time. I’ve believed in legalization ever since I was 14. However, I’m not a fan of this infographic. The figures it contains make me question whether the author did their homework. It doesn’t pass the sniff test, and because of that I can’t rely on it.
I figured I might as well check to see if my intuition was right. I was unable to find an organization that actually tracks annual deaths due to marijuana, but I did find some literature about it. To the infographic’s credit, there is some literature that says that studies usually fail to find an impact from marijuana on all-cause mortality. However, even that literature doesn’t conclude that marijuana can’t cause death. Instead, they say that there is a lack of research on the topic.
From The Health Effects of Cannabis and Cannabinoids:
There is an overall dearth of cohort studies empirically assessing general population cannabis use and all-cause mortality. Although the available evidence suggests that cannabis use is not associated with an increased risk of all-cause mortality, the limited nature of that evidence makes it impossible to have confidence in these findings. These conclusions are not informed by the results of existing large-scale modeling studies that synthesized data from a variety of sources to estimate the burden of disease attributable to cannabis use (Degenhardt et al., 2013; Imtiaz et al., 2016). Although these studies were methodologically rigorous, their direct applicability to actual cannabis-related mortality rates in the United States is uncertain. Consequently, the committee chose not to include them in this review. Also excluded from review were studies of mortality among persons with known cannabis addiction or dependence, those who have been under medical treatment for these disorders, or those who were identified through a country's criminal justice system, due to presence in these populations of important and often inadequately controlled confounders such as concurrent mental illness and poly-substance abuse.
CONCLUSION 9-1 There is insufficient evidence to support or refute a statistical association between self-reported cannabis use and all-cause mortality.
So while they have something to point to in order to kinda sorta justify their “0” figure, it’s very weak, and the 0 figure still seems super suspect to me. I would bet that if they ever do track marijuana-related deaths like they do for tobacco, then they will find more deaths from marijuana smoke than was listed on the infographic for either caffeine or aspirin.
With this sort of media, when I see a low number other than 0, I’m usually less suspicious. Seeing a low non-zero number gives me a sense something was actually checked. If the figure actually is zero, then they might need to do a bit extra to convince me. Simply saying “yes, we checked” helps a little bit. At least it lets me know that they knew they were supposed to check. It’s even better when I can see what they checked, and where I can find it. At least that would let me know that they’re trying to be accurate.
This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from around the world. Feel free to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the BRICS expansion or the Prigozhin assassination, or even just whatever you’re reading.
Gabon
Last week I reported that Gabon’s election would almost certainly result in a victory for Ali Bongo, current heir of the Bongo family that has dominated Gabon since 1967. He did win, but apparently the military had other ideas, because they have staged yet another African coup and declared themselves in power. This is a little different than the coups that have happened in democracies, because Gabon was basically a dictatorship with a thin veneer of fake elections, but represents another startling addition to the trend of coups.
Brazil
Lula has been somewhat stymied so far in his agenda by his Worker’s Party’s minority in the legislature:
Despite progress on certain bills – including the passage of looser limits on public expenditure, and approval in the lower house of long-awaited tax reform – Lula has suffered a series of parliamentary defeats. Lawmakers thwarted plans to roll back privatisation of the water and sewerage sector, before stripping powers from the environment and newly created indigenous affairs ministries.
He seems to have now hammered out a larger coalition with two right wing parties that previously supported Bolsonaro, the Republican Party and the Progressive Party (I know, I swear it’s on the right). The details aren’t fully finalized yet but it seems that both parties will get cabinet positions, and possibly one of them the administration of Brazil’s state owned bank, Banco do Brasil. In exchange they will help support Lula’s spending packages and measures at environmental protection and worker’s and minority rights. It’s a pretty unique coalition and presumably these parties will still not give Lula a blank check, so it will be interesting to see how things go.
Colombia
President Gustavo Petro was elected on a “Total Peace” platform to significantly reduce conflict with the country’s cartels and revolutionary groups through peace talks and by legalizing some drugs. There have been some big successes, including a ceasefire with the ELN and ongoing negotiations with the active remnants of FARC (Petro’s previous organization). However, Insight Crime has released a rather critical assessment of Total Peace overall, based off this (Spanish language) think tank report:
During its first year, the Petro government has overseen a significant reduction in confrontations between state security forces and armed groups…
Between July 2022 and August 2023, there were fewer than 100 clashes, while in 2021 there were more than 170…
But not everything is positive. The report's data show that disputes between the country's main armed groups have increased as they look to maintain and expand their territorial control. Clashes between armed groups have grown by 85% during Petro's first year in office, making it the highest figure in the last decade.
During this period, the ex-FARC mafia, ELN, and AGC have reinforced their ranks. Their combined total membership is now 7,620, according to the report. They are also supported by a network of at least 7,512 people, exceeding the figures reported in previous years, which averaged 6,000…
Although homicides have decreased by 1.5% in comparison to the last year under former president, Iván Duque (2018-2022), violence has continued unabated in the departments where armed groups have a strong presence.
The island of San Andrés and the departments of Sucre and Vaupes, where the AGC and the ex-FARC mafia have operations, have seen homicides increase by 72%, 59%, and 50% respectively. Bolivar and Putumayo also saw increases of between 10% and 20%.
At the national level, kidnapping have risen by 77% and extortion by almost 15%. In both cases, these are the highest figures in the last decade and contrast starkly against the goals of Total Peace
China
Things continue to look bleak in China. The government has stopped reporting youth unemployment numbers. Evergrande (the real estate giant from the fiasco in 2021) had their stock fall by another 80%, leaving them (if I read correctly) at under 1% of their value as of three years ago. China does appear to be taking a few scattered steps to address the situation:
Also on Monday, China halved a 0.1% tax on stock trading to "invigorate the capital market and boost investor confidence".
Major share indexes in Hong Kong and mainland China rose after the news. The move came days after the country's central bank cut one of its key interest rates for the second time in three months, in the face of falling exports and weak consumer spending.
Time writes on the global ripple effects, some negative:
Global investors have already pulled more than $10 billion from China’s stock markets, with most of the selling in blue chips. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley have cut their targets for Chinese equities, with the former also warning of spillover risks to the rest of the region.
Asian economies are taking the biggest hit to their trade so far, along with countries in Africa. Japan reported its first drop in exports in more than two years in July after China cut back on purchases of cars and chips. Central bankers from South Korea and Thailand last week cited China’s weak recovery for downgrades to their growth forecasts…
as the world’s second-largest economy, a prolonged slowdown in China will hurt, rather than help, the rest of the world. An analysis from the International Monetary Fund shows how much is at stake: when China’s growth rate rises by 1 percentage point, global expansion is boosted by about 0.3 percentage points…
Many countries, especially those in Asia, count China as their biggest export market for everything from electronic parts and food to metals and energy.
The value of Chinese imports has fallen for nine of the last 10 months as demand retreats from the record highs set during the pandemic. The value of shipments from Africa, Asia and North America were all lower in July than they were a year ago.
…and some positive:
It’s not all doom-and-gloom, though. China’s slowdown will drag down global oil prices, and deflation in the country means the prices of goods being shipped around the world are falling. That’s a benefit to countries like the U.S. and U.K. still battling high inflation.
Some emerging markets like India also see opportunities, hoping to attract the foreign investment that may be leaving China’s shores.
Pakistan
The Islamabad High Court (not the Supreme Court, but kind of like the equivalent of a circuit court for the Islamabad Capital Region) has suspended Imran Khan’s prison sentence and ordered that he be released. This is still evolving and the government is resistant for now, insisting he needs to remain in jail for now. It remains to be seen how things will progress.
Zimbabwe
Predictably, the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) won last week’s election, keeping their 43 year hold on power steady. Incumbent President Emmerson Mnangagwa AKA The Crocodile, who took power from Mugabe six years ago in a coup, will continue to govern. South Africa and the US have acknowledged criticisms of the election but have for now called for peace. Under the constitution this is Mnangagwa’s last legal term. Most people think he will try to run again anyway, though he’s currently 80 so it’s up in the air whether he will even be alive in 2028.
Ethiopia
Ethiopia, Egypt, and Sudan met to negotiate over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GRED) across the Nile. Ethiopia put nearly $5 billion into GERD and would be able to generate vast amounts of electricity for its energy-deprived populace, but it would reduce the flow of water to Egypt and Sudan (the Nile is the only major river that actually runs south-to-north) which Sudan is wary about and Egypt considers an existential threat to the 85% of its water supply that comes from Ethiopia. The latter two nations are demanding a legally binding agreement as to how the dam will be operated, filled, and maintained. Ethiopia, uh, doesn't want to do that. Reportedly no progress was made; the next round of talks will happen in Addis Ababa with the hypothetical deadline for an agreement in October.
Also, updates on the Ethiopian conflict in the Amhara region, following President Abiy’s attempt to integrate the Amhara paramilitary Fano into the overall military (mirroring his political project to integrate the ethnic political parties into one coalition loyal to him):
"At least 183 people have been killed in clashes since July, according to information gathered by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights", the OHCHR spokeswoman continued…
"We are very concerned about the deterioration of the human rights situation in certain regions of Ethiopia", said Marta Hurtado, stressing that the state of emergency gives the authorities wide powers.
In particular, it allows them to arrest suspects without a court order, impose curfews and ban public gatherings, she detailed."We have received reports that more than 1,000 people have been arrested throughout Ethiopia under this law.
Many of them are young people of Amhara ethnic origin suspected of being supporters of Fano", she said."Since the beginning of August, massive house-to-house searches have reportedly taken place", she added."We call on the authorities to put an end to the mass arrests, to ensure that any deprivation of liberty is subject to judicial review, and to release those arbitrarily detained", she said, calling on all those involved in the conflict "to put an end to the killings, other violations and abuses".
NPR also has a retrospective on the conflict of the past few years, “How did Ethiopia go from its leader winning the Nobel Peace Prize to war in a year?”, which I’m partially sharing because the guest is one incredibly named GEBREKIRSTOS GEBRESELASSIE GEBREMESKEL.
Transnational Thursdays 10
Happy 10th TT guys, feels like some kind of accomplishment.
This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from around the world. Feel free to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the Ukraine War, or even just whatever you’re reading. Last week’s thread covered forgotten wars, to give a sense of how flexible it is.
Spain
Observers expected Spain’s elections to bring a right wing government into power. However, the ruling socialist PSOE did better than expected (given their recent large losses in municipal and local elections) and the far right Vox did far worse. The center right PP pulled ahead of PSOE, but Vox’s loss of 19 seats prevents the two parties from together forming a majority. PSOE and the farther left Sumar together are smaller still, but probably have better odds of finding a third coalitional partner due to Vox’s toxicity for third parties. This probably means that current PM Sanchez would need to coalition with the Basque or Catalan independence parties, who he has decent relations with but would still likely require playing to some of their demands.
Niger
Niger’s president Mohamed Bazoum yesterday announced the presidential guards had locked him inside the palace in what seems to be an attempted coup. He says the army stands ready to defend him but apparently not so - the military has now taken him prisoner and announced they’ve taken power of the country. Niger is legendary for their coups and no one would pretend Bazoum was a great leader, but coming on a string on military coups across West Africa it’s mostly just depressing.
Ecuador
Violence has been bad in Ecuador for a while now, culminating in the high profile assassination of a mayor last week. President Guillermo Lasso, who a few months ago dismissed Congress and has ruled by decree since, recently declared a state of emergency in two affected provinces suspending freedom of assembly and movement. You may remember also Honduras declaring a state of emergency after a prison riot and giving control of the prison system to the military. Ecuador has now done the same for Ecuador's own prison system following a strangely similar prison riot. Lasso has said that he will not run for reelection but his increasing authoritarianism has kept watchers skeptical.
Guatemala
As of now it looks like Bernardo Arévalo will be legally allowed to participate in the runoff election but the Attorney General has been cracking down however possible, recently issuing a police order to raid his campaign headquarters. Semilla supporters and civil society groups have been protesting in response. The US has now added several related prosecutors to the Engels targeted sanction list along with officials who participated in the politically motivated crackdown against the journalist José Rubén Zamora for criticizing government corruption.
Argentina
Argentina and the IMF are supposedly near to reaching yet another agreement to help pay back the $44 billion they took on under the previous administration. The payments were conditional on Argentina doing some fiscally responsible stuff like shoring up reserves and moderating their deficit, which they definitely didn’t do, but they have now demonstrated some reform willingness by announcing a new preferential exchange rate for export goods and raising some import taxes. This is a five month deal so it would last until a new president takes office in December.
Kenya
President William Ruto, who took office last year as a progressive champion of the poor, recently raised taxes to help Kenya pay back its debts. Coming during a period of prolonged inflation, this spurred waves of protests against the government, led by the opposition coalition Azimio and their leader Raila Odinga. Police brutality has responded in turn and things have spiraled further. The protests have grown increasingly looting-filled, but the allegations about police brutality aren’t a joke either:
More than two dozen rights groups including Amnesty International last week said they had evidence of 27 “extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions” in July alone.
Ruto has formerly offered to have a sitdown meeting with Odinga but the latter has refused. Odinga was the opposition candidate in the last two elections and feels 2017 was stolen from him (it probably was), so is now unwilling to deal with current government.
Burkina Faso
France has withdrawn its troops as well as its ambassador yesterday following the demands of Burkina Faso’s military junta. This is despite the fact that almost half of Burkinabe territory is considered to be dominated by radical groups, whether Taureg secessionists from Mali or Islamist fundamentalist groups. The conflict has been especially bad lately and over a tenth of the population has been displaced, causing the Norweigan Refugee Council to rank Burkina Faso as the world’s most neglected displacement crisis. Still, the new government has made an anti-French stance a central plank of their governance and has alo suspended French owned media channels. Following their departure from Mali, also at the behest of a military junta, France only has about 3000 troops left, mostly in Niger and Chad.
India
You may remember previous coverage of the escalating ethnic violence in the Manipur region. Opposition parties in India are now initiating a vote of no confidence against Modi for his refusal to address the conflict, which has displaced over 60,000 people. The vote is assuredly stillborn against a BJP majority.
Modi has “revealed” his plank for a third term. Unfortunately I can’t really find details but it’s completely oriented around development. India was the tenth largest economy when Modi took office and is now the fifth; Modi has promised to raise it to third place. Obligatory pinging of /u/self_made_human.
Cambodia
Cambodian President Hun Sen, who has ruled essentially since the collapse of the Khmer Rouge, claimed another landslide win a few days ago in a completely farcical election. A tragedy for the good people of Cambodia but a huge W for dedicated Hun watchers hoping for their boy to hold onto his high score:
Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen, 70, has been in power since 1985 – only the leaders of Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea, both also authoritarians, have held office longer.
I wonder if when you reach this level you feel like you’re in a competition with the other heavy hitters.
Perhaps not, because shockingly yesterday he announced his formal resignation, ending his tenure as Asia’s preeminent dictator. That said, Hun has said that he will stay on as leader of the communist party and his son - who was literally only just elected as an MP - will now become Prime Minister, so we certainly haven’t heard the last of him yet.