2rafa
13hr ago
Rubio’s family left before communism, although it’s an open question whether that matters given he’s so strongly identified himself with the exiles from communism.
2rafa
14hr ago
I have a ‘special test’ where I ask an LLM a series of questions about the ancestors of semi-prominent political figures from multiple third world non-English speaking countries. Stuff like “tell me about Xi Jinping’s great grandparents”, but for people much less prominent than him.
At the start, they would hallucinate all the time. Then, they became firmer about saying “there’s no information”. Then, they became a little better about finding and translating obscure foreign language sources and gleaning little bits of data from them. Now they’re really good at this, but the hallucination / BS frequency seems to have gone back up slightly.
2rafa
15hr ago
Undoubtedly but asylum alone isn’t the answer, huge numbers of Iranians emigrated and it’s easy for Iranians to claim asylum in Europe (or it was for a very long time anyway), but it didn’t stop a long history of protest.
2rafa
23hr ago
The Iranian regime is built to survive. As a result of the unique story of its emergence and the very unlikely survival of the movement in the face of both the Iraq-Iran war and the (initially) much larger socialist/student/Tudeh movement that it and its predecessor(s) utterly crushed, the IRGC is one of the most competent military bodies in the world if you consider its primary purpose the pacification of the Iranian people.
Khomeini understood that the bourgeois class would never fully support an Islamist revolution. Unlike various historical socialist revolutionaries, though, he realized that at least some of them were necessary for the economic survival of the state. He therefore set in motion a series of events that would lead to them being policed, essentially, by the sons of the devout lower middle-class, often semi-rural (but occasionally urban or rural) who would form the nexus of the IRGC and be utterly loyal to the clerical class (without whom they would go back to being nobodies). The IRGC would enrich itself, but never quite to the extent of e.g. the Egyptian or Pakistani military states, where military control of the economy is so absolute that the private sector is entirely subordinate to it in most industries.
In general, if you look at the big 3 US ‘axis of evil’ states still around, they each have a different relationship to popular protest. North Korea has almost none, not only because of the absoluteness of ideological surveillance and the ubiquitous East German style custom of informing on neighbors but because the people are completely ideologically indoctrinated into dynastic worship of the Kim family. Cuba has middling protests every 25 years where one or two people get killed and someone prominent resigns or apologizes but the regime is never under serious threat; Cubans are too lazy for revolution and those smart and ambitious enough to try it either rise within the Party or flee to America.
Only Iran actually has regular violent protests; unlike the Cubans or North Koreans, they have real, serious interest in regime change. But the IRGC is a well oiled machine with no loyalty to the protestors, and it just keeps gunning them down, hundreds a day, until order is restored. Life in Iran is bad but not hell, and to the domestic middle and upper middle classes, with their email jobs and social media, this is not worth dying over. That is why the regime stands a good chance of surviving in some form.
2rafa
1d ago
Within hours of the strikes mainstream western press was quoting experts saying, basically “this would have delayed them by a few months at the most; the most valuable facilities are dispersed and too deep underground”, so I don’t think this is accurate.
2rafa
2d ago
Tyranny is bad, but the argument of my comment was to suggest that - right now - the long term political consequences of mass immigration (a lower trust, poorer, more violent, more unequal and more corrupt country) outweigh the risks that this almost certainly accidental death is a sure sign of descent into tyranny. I also just replied to wandererinthewilderness in this same thread, apologies for not tagging you.
2rafa
2d ago
All fair points. I don’t discount the risk of tyranny - North Korea scares me, too. But I also think a lot of our understanding of life being awful in eg the Soviet Union or Maoist China (an understanding that is generally accurate, I think) is because of the terrible ideological choices and economic system that led directly to famine, starvation, poverty, lack of material goods and squalor. Even the extreme violence of the Cultural Revolution - which was bottom-up, not top-down the way that totalitarian state-performed violence is - was part of this.
In fact, the kind of people who were really likely to be persecuted by the KGB were largely what passed for the Soviet upper and upper middle class, people “like me” if you want to take that line of argument, who worked in state administration, running large enterprises, academia, media and so on. Most average working class people had very different problems.
2rafa
2d ago
The highest crime-related murder rates in the world tend to cap out around 100 per 100,000 per year. The Khmer Rouge murder rate was something like 7,000 per 100,000 per year.
I don’t think counting extremely destructive, ideologically motivated civil conflict as “tyranny” is particularly productive in this discussion, or else plenty of early modern European countries that don’t really count ask ‘tyrannies’ are tyrannies. A totalitarian tyranny isn’t “when you kill half of your population for being the wrong race/religion/sect/caste”, that’s far too broad and common throughout human history. Humans living in tribes before the Neolithic revolution also saw very high male death rates to murder per year in many cases, is that ‘tyranny’?
The reality is that North Korea and Eritrea both probably still have higher quality of life than Haiti right now.
2rafa
2d ago
It just seems manifestly obvious that the failure state where enforcement melts away is vastly more common that the failure state where the entire country is, essentially, imprisoned. Anarchy and tyranny can co-exist, but anarcho-tyranny is a conservative/reactionary concept precisely because it describes a failure of liberal democracy in which protected, left-friendly groups aren’t prosecuted while unprotected ones are.
2rafa
2d ago
Both were fine, if not justified (the latter as the narrower question).
In general, people overestimate the risk of tyranny and underestimate the risk of anarchy.
How many truly tyrannical, totalitarian states are there in the world? North Korea, obviously. Eritrea, to some extent. After that the lines get a lot more blurred. You certainly wouldn’t want to be a dissident in Iran or China, but the vast majority of the population is not really ‘enslaved by the state’ (or ‘under constant, totalitarian absolute surveillance with extreme penalties for the tiniest stepping out of line’) the way that people are in a true tyranny.
Even across the 20th century, true tyranny was rare. Neither the Gestapo nor the KGB were capable of it, for example, nor was any CCP domestic intelligence agency, certainly until very recently. In fact, the only major Marxist nation that was truly, terrifyingly totalitarian in the 1984 sense was East Germany.
By contrast, how many ungovernable shitholes are there in the world in which criminals, gangs and others run riot, with the central government hopelessly weak, corrupt or otherwise powerless to stop them? Many, many more. Half of the Sahel, Haiti and a large chunk of Central America, Papua New Guinea, big parts of Somalia and Northern Kenya, large parts of Nigeria and Niger, parts of Syria etc.
We should be much more concerned about anarchy than tyranny.
2rafa
3d ago
Control is too Finnish to be plausibly American. Call me a chauvinist but I just don’t like when especially European game developers try to create authentically or quasi-authentically American spaces, they just can’t do it. It’s fine for Grand Theft Auto because it’s inherently a foreign satire of America, which is fine, but not for things that try to be a little more sincere.
They should have set the game in Finland, which would probably be even more interesting. Hogwarts Legacy suffered from the same problem in reverse, it was clearly created by Americans.
2rafa
3d ago
Great post. I do think, though, that if you narrow things down to the modern, “backrooms” type of liminal space, it fits into the broad category of depictions of common dreams. It’s less about horror, or the edge of the forest, and much more about the strange, incompletely recreated, bizarrely navigated versions of reality we dream of. I distinctly remember having dozens, maybe hundreds of individual dreams almost identical to backrooms type spaces (endless corridors and rooms made up of components of buildings I had navigated in real life) before I became familiar with the concept. If I had to speculate I would say that our own generative intelligence isn’t generally able to create fully realistic, fully plausible, fully coherently navigable (in the ‘interior dimensions match exterior dimensions, rooms plausibly fit the space and connect appropriately etc) interactive environments in our head - at least for those who haven’t specifically trained memory palace type techniques, and even those involve only a very limited form of three dimensional reconstruction in some form - so we have these weird spaces we navigate in our dreams, not in a sinister way but in a processing capacity way. The primitive AI we have works in much the same way, it can generate already compelling video and imagery but struggles (albeit ever less so) with multiple angles of the same event or space, with that exact coherence I mention above.
The liminal space idea is just one in a long line of attempts by artists to depict the contents of our dreams.
2rafa
3d ago
This was what came to mind, too. Minneapolis was spared the ruin of the rust belt, even though it lacked the thing that saved the only other major city in the Midwest (Chicago), which was being the economic capital of the whole region. But over the last 20 years a lot of the economy it did retain has either stagnated or declined.
2rafa
3d ago
I don’t know much about Iran but I think the Ayatollah and guardian council have much more power than you suggest. The guardian council essentially has absolute power along with the ayatollah (ability to veto any law and disqualify any candidates for any election) and is 50% chosen by him, and 50% elected by the parliament (which the guardian council can, as mentioned, disqualify candidates for).
2rafa
4d ago
If Trump really wants it he can make a deal (under threat of sanctions or impossibly high tariffs on Danish exports) with Denmark to offer a referendum with three options:
- Remain part of Denmark
- Declare independence (leading to economic ruin and the vast majority of the population having to leave as subsidies dry up)
- Become an American territory with a $100k cash payment per person and a continuation of subsidies
My guess is that in this scenario the overwhelmingly Inuit population which has some of the highest rates of alcoholism and suicide in the world will vote for option 3, or a modified option 2 with the explicit promise of an economic suzerainty relationship that is essentially 3 in all but name.
This referendum would conform to both EU and UN guidance on the rights of indigenous peoples and self-determination blah blah blah.
However it would probably also require Congress, and they are both uninterested and know that Trump gains and loses interest in this topic regularly.
2rafa
5d ago
The groypers/tankies/islamists would kill/expel/rape/torture/imprison me anyway, so I’m unclear as to why I owe them any empathy.
And I’m not defending her death. In fact, you can go back to 2020 when I was a comparative moderate (when compared to some regulars) on Floyd because I believed (and still do believe) that on balance, Chauvin’s hold was unreasonable - even if I don’t think he should have gone to jail, certainly not for the length of time he did, for it.
But the episode taught me one thing. If you give the left an inch, they take a mile. If you agree that a single cop did something dumb, you get the police defunded, a wave of ridiculous and damaging woke in the private and public sector, and the greatest crime wave in decades. So while I don’t defend this, I know the only thing for it is to say “OK, what about it?”, to give not one inch.
Yes, or at least he is failing to take the action he should and so allowing that ruin to happen. He should listen to Miller instead of the agricultural lobby.
“If you don’t have borders, you don’t have a country”
- Bernie Sanders (paraphrased)
When you stand against immigration enforcement you stand against the future of the entire civilization we share. You are saying that you want your descendants and mine to live in a dirtier, poorer, more squalid, more corrupt, more unequal, more violent country, forever.
That is treason no less severe than selling nuclear secrets to Russia or Iran, and perhaps moreso. Trump’s loss in 2020 was sealed the second he started showing sympathy to the Floyd rioters. He shouldn’t make that mistake again, and I’m glad that so far the administration is making a strong stand.
If you obstruct ICE in any capacity, why should I care what happens to you, when by your very action you are saying you don’t care about what happens to me?
2rafa
6d ago
This will get regulated eventually. It’s incoherent to apply an entirely different regime to ‘prediction market bets’ than to financial markets, especially when plenty of eg Polymarket markets proxy the regulated securities market (betting on recessions, corporate performance/product, fed policy) as exchanges and others have raised.
There is, like Sloot said, a long history of libertarians and some other people arguing that insider trading should be legal to allow for better price discovery / for market efficiency, that it should be limited only contractually (eg. between employee and employer).
But people instinctually don’t like the idea of insider trading, and so it doesn’t seem coherent to allow it only on Polymarket. The most liquid prediction markets also have a relatively large amount of federally-mandated KYC now, so investigation can’t be substantially harder than for other insider trading.
I think it will happen. Maybe not soon, but eventually. That said, people do get away with insider trading most of the time. There were substantial moves in Israeli securities, in oil, in defense before October 7 for example, presumably because a lot of people knew and those people talked.
Iraq is doing about as well as a non-GCC Arab country can do for now. Judged against its peers, it’s got good growth, a functioning economy with real median income having increased a lot in the last decade, and as a basket case of ethnic tensions between Sunni Arabs, Shias and Kurds it’s being vaguely held together with comparatively minimal violence.
In general though I agree with your point.
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