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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
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User ID: 355
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
18hr ago
A quick search reveals several counterexamples, to say nothing of those with non-Muslim perpetrators, but I guess vibeposting is more satisfying.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
I consider the ability to execute and maintain complex compromises to be part of what is the "executive function" of society as a compound organism, by analogy with the executive function of an individual.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
Lack of executive function, as I also claim in my other comment.
The exact mechanism by which the executive function is lost is that both the "immigrants good" faction and the "immigrants bad" faction see their optimal marginal strategy as drumming up alignment with the simple and straightforward sentiments I labelled them by. A position like "more smart prosocial immigrants, but fewer stupid violent ones" will be ejected by the former camp because the "fewer" part just diluted and muddles immigrants-good sentiment; likewise, the latter camp will eject it for the "more" part having the same effect on immigrants-bad sentiment.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
· Edited 18hr ago
The problem is that things are simultaneously too easy for the "bad immigrants" and too hard for the "good immigrants". You can bet your whole career, with massive opportunity cost, on something like eventually winning the greencard lottery, while simultaneously hoping an H1B employer won't exploit you too badly in the meantime; or you can walk across the border and do low-skill informal-economy jobs far from the state's eye, while getting 10x the pay in your country of origin, and have a whole half of the CW binary advocate for you if you were to ever get in trouble (and it's not like the Mexican haul-heavy-shit employers will be questioning you about the gap in your CV and ability to attend American conferences if you were to fail, spend a year in ICE jail and get deported).
Unfortunately, our societies are just reliably lacking in executive function to see a problem for which some solution (immigration enforcement, policing...) exists as having more knobs than a single "more of the solution"/"less of the solution" one. "Have police arrest more criminals while being less violent and more discerning" was not a significant camp in the BLM discourse, either.
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2d ago
My gut feeling as a godless European is that there is a difference between being directly discriminated against based on your religion and being indirectly discriminated against because of behaviors required by your religion which break popular social norms or laws.
In the US nowadays, with opposite CW valence, this sounds like a clear-cut case of "disparate impact". Of course it's rather concerning if a protected group can be disparately impacted "by choice", but there lies a whole rabbit hole of further spicy questions.
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5d ago
I used to struggle with this in law school, the idea of extra time or drugs to help someone focus on legal work strikes me as absurd in a professional school that is explicitly preparing the majority of its students to function through billable hours.
Why are drugs (Adderall etc.?) at all akin to extra time, or generally the problem you discuss? Someone who takes Adderall to complete the job in the allotted time still completes it in the allotted time.
Not that the analogy is perfect, but if anything, the restriction of access to drugs feels more similar to "accommodations" here: rather than letting the law of the jungle do its work and give the job to whoever is willing to sacrifice whatever it takes to do it best and fastest, it artificially levels the playing field for the benefit of those who would not augment their performance with drugs, even if the job to be done suffers for it. Presumably the reasoning is that for moral/aesthetic/higher reasons, we value the undrugged equilibrium higher than the best possible legal work, just as disability accommodations are justified because for moral/aesthetic/higher reasons, we value equity higher than the best possible legal work.
(edit, I see @fmaa made the same point below. Should have refreshed before posting)
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7d ago
taught Latin American right wing death squads
That's the crux, though? I didn't write "directly" for no reason. In terms of indirect support and training, American fingers have involved on most sides of most conflicts.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7d ago
· Edited 7d ago
I thought Venezuela is mostly for cocaine (not an opioid), and fentanyl supposedly comes from China by way of Mexico? Now, you could argue that cocaine played a role when the US elected a TV personality president, given its use as an "act confidently in front of a crowd" drug, but...
(...and well, "destabilizing" does not meet the standard definition of terrorism either. Do you think Russia would be right to outlaw everyone involved in VoA/RFERL in the medieval sense too? Every kinetic war is "destabilizing" in the most straightforward sense; would "destabilizing=>terrorism=>give no quarter" then be a fully general argument against any ius in bello?)
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7d ago
I can see how the terrorist label would apply to some in the narcotics trade (e.g. the Mexican cartels), but here it really doesn't seem applicable -especially if, as the Trump administration seems to insinuate, the drug trade is indeed backed by the Venezuelan government. What political ends do they need to achieve by fear if they are already in power? (Mind you, the rule by fear that is implied by deterrence/the government monopoly on violence is usually exempted from the definition of terrorism unless you are a particular brand of anarchist.)
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7d ago
There's a difference between "bad blood" (even on the level of sponsoring coups and what-not) and "you, personally, can not assume there are any baseline rules limiting what the US government would do to you". I don't think that even during the darkest years of the cold war there was much to suggest that Americans would directly engage in lawless killing or torture of average South Americans to further their goals, in the way they do with Middle Easterners.
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7d ago
I take it that Kosovo and the repeated wars involving Israel were the US opposing that taboo, then?
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7d ago
In what sense are drug smugglers, if we grant that they in fact were for the sake of argument, "terrorists"? Terrorists, as I understand the word, are people who aim to instill fear in a civilian population by way of violent acts in order to extract political concessions. What concessions are drug smugglers aiming for, what are the violent acts, and what civilian population do they instill fear in? I would have thought that drug smugglers simply smuggle drugs because they want to earn money. This makes them regular financially motivated criminals. If the US government blew up the getaway car of supermarket thieves, and then methodically shot the survivors around the crash site dead, this would also result in an outcry. If anything, the US is more suspect of something meeting the definition of "terrorism" here: the best explanation for this sort of double-tap attack seems to be that they seek to instill fear in other would-be drug smugglers.
Apart from that, and also responding to @JTarrou above, as much as this is something few want to say out loud, but until now there has been a general tacit understanding that since 9/11 at the latest (if not since the founding of Israel), Middle Easterners are a special class that in the eyes of the US does not really have human rights; Americans generally can and will murder them with impunity, and in return it naturally can't really be helped that Americans may not expect baseline civilised treatment from them either. As someone who has many American friends and relations, I therefore begrudgingly accepted that they should be kept separate from people in that class, and I couldn't for example expect them to join me in travelling to those countries (so e.g. my long-standing wish to travel to Iran may not be realised together with my American SO). It does not seem like a good prospect if this class were to be expanded to Latin Americans - the geographic proximity is greater, the entanglements run deeper, and the affected countries and peoples hold more social and cultural value. More importantly, why? What did the US actually gain from killing the shipwrecked here (as opposed to picking them up and sending them to a POW camp or whatever), or blowing up the desert weddings in the past? Do you all trust your government so much that you just assume it has good reasons to do what it does, even if the immediate consequence is that in large parts of the world you may be picked off the street and justifiedly hauled off to be tortured and killed?
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10d ago
Can you define "maximally escalate" in your claim? I can think of many levels of escalation that I would be willing to bet all my polymarket monopoly money on not happening.
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10d ago
It doesn't help that the stereotypical tech bro, even if he is no Zuck or Musk, has made a name for himself as willing to lick the SF hobo poop off as many boots as it takes for a chance to be a little more like them. It's hard to argue on an emotional level that a cringe wannabe "sigma grindset" Zuckerberg of smart juicers isn't even more revolting than the real deal.
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13d ago
Adding to @Jiro's comment below, there are some arguable cases predating the level of statecraft needed for full colonisation: the Magyars turned up on Europe's borders as a tribal confederation and took plenty of scalps until getting their asses handed to them by the Germanics, whereupon they seemingly settled down and advanced to whatever they technical frontier of 12th century Europe was. The various states of the Korean peninsula were still in tribal stage when first encountered by the Chinese blob but had seemingly more or less caught up before the Mongols/Yuan riding the soft power tiger that was the Middle Kingdom finally rolled over them.
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14d ago
· Edited 14d ago
"Silence is violence" is absolutely deployed in defense of "free speech" too - it's a mainstay in protests where students disrupt unrelated university functions to inject progressive talking points of the day, and in those cases is taken to mean that being forced to stay silent (on the talking points, at university) is tantamount to being forced to be complicit in violence. Essentially, you and they are conflating the "I have the right to be heard" notion of free speech and the "I have the right to speak wherever and whenever I want" notion; while neither can be implemented perfectly, we can get a lot closer to something like a stable equilibrium with the former.
Also, from where do you get the idea that there is a consensus here, and anyone is trying to force some other consensus? I am under the impression that, weighted by posting frequency or upvotes, this place leans mildly towards the at least boogaloo-sympathetic. I do not think that a right-wing uprising in the US would win, and I am generally pro-chaos so I would want to see it happen! Yet, I do not want it to be discussed here, just like I don't want my approximation algorithms lecture to be disrupted by people yelling about Palestine (even though I am inclined to agree with them).
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14d ago
Why does there need to be "prevailing wisdom" here on this topic at all? You treat it as a given that we can't just ignore the topic, as something that can't be discussed while maintaining the spirit and purpose of the forum, and perhaps even mean to suggest that enforcing non-discussion is tantamount to complicity with your enemies. The exact same approach has been tried on the other side, with popular glosses like "the personal is political", "silence is violence" and what-not; and look where the discussion norms built around those memes got them.
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14d ago
Irrespective of whether it's "rational", is it really a conversation we need or want here? I'm with @FiveHourMarathon below regarding how these discussions always wind up going. I don't even think that there aren't interesting discussions to be had about how a popular uprising in the US would proceed, but the burden at this point should really be with those who want to talk about it to lead with something novel rather than another instance of "my chad tribesmen will beat the shit out of your effeminate wimps, if only the sheeple finally wake up and develop classtribal counsciousness".
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14d ago
One of the consequences of propaganda culture that I think is not discussed enough is how having too effective control of public opinion in your camp can actually work against you in contexts where treaties have to be made. Similarly to the concept of "right to be sued" I have seen in the context of trade agreements, being able to assert that some party will judge and appropriately punish you should you violate the terms actually gives you more freedom to offer terms. In the case of international agreements, when the world police (US) has a stake in the game or is aggressively indifferent or both, the only one that could stand in judgement whether a treaty is being adhered to is public opinion (which could enforce its judgement by boycotts, protests or simply non-cooperation when a treaty party needs the general public to cooperate e.g. by enlisting to fight in the military or maintaining social exclusion). However, this does not work if a treaty party has the part of the public it is sensitive to (usually its own populace) around its finger to the point that it will always be able to convince it that it is in the right. In this way, Russia has crippled itself long ago, and the collective West has by now followed suit.
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14d ago
I don't know, is the NATO:Russia air advantage much bigger than the Russia:Ukraine air advantage? Being able to lob KABs is one thing, but Russia at no point dared overflying Ukraine freely, because the economics and optics of losing even one manned plane every now and then because an AD launcher was successfully hidden in a nondescript warehouse somewhere are too painful. The dynamics of a hot war with the involvement of the entirety of NATO would of course be different, but despite everything it seems implausible to me that they would look like the comfy desert turkey shoot war that NATOcore acolytes live for.
(I would also expect that the opening move after a NATO entry into the war is that at least all the NPPs in Ukraine - and quite possibly also everything in Europe east of the centerline of Germany - get blown up, since the only thing that kept them safe so far is Western sensibilities. As for what effect this would have on warfighting capabilities, I honestly can't tell - do we have contingencies to maintain our economy if there is actually no energy grid? Would the sudden need to cook on an open fire in your block's courtyard shatter Europe's heiwa-boke and result in rapid return to WWII-era buff doge form, or a quick noping out and licking of wounds?)
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14d ago
One of the most fun culture war games to play is always that most men:women statistics about bad things have similar counterparts with black people:white people, and with those each tribe's inclinations to downplay or exaggerate are flipped.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
17d ago
I don't know, I think at least on an intuitive level she was more than cynical enough. There were many adjacent justifications that she could have told herself and her party allies to rationalise it - a real sense of compassion, and the need to get workers to fill low-level jobs in the face of dipping birth rates (which when you think about it really is almost a flip side of "stop leftists from being able to drive a hard bargain for cushy jobs").
Moreover, I think there was another semi-cynical reason in play for Merkel in particular, which was their ongoing conflict with the European South about austerity (a Merkelian pet project if there ever was one). By inviting all the refuges (who came via many of the same Southern countries) to Germany, she simultaneously piled up Germany's karma supplies (in the eyes especially of those who were starting to feel uneasy about the resentment their policy was inspiring in their southern neighbours), created a concrete debt (since per normal asylum rules many of those refugees would have been the responsibility of Spain/Italy/Greece where they first entered the European mainland) and an implicit threat if they keep resisting German demands (Germany doesn't have to take all those refugees off their hands).
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17d ago
My pet conspiracy theory regarding Europe was always that our own continental elite - the ilk of Merkels and Merzes and von der Leyens, and their true power base of dynasties owning supermarket chains, publishing houses and car manufacturers - was shocked into action by the left-based attacks on their core interests in the '90s and early '00s. This was when waves of popular protests empowered by the ascendant internet demanded increasingly cushy labour conditions, tanked transatlantic trade treaties that were meant to secure information-economy revenue streams against the internet gift economy, and often even produced geopolitical embarrassment such as when Germany was forced to keep its involvement in the Iraq war a minimum.
Their political intuitions correctly told them that introducing a large culturally incompatible immigrant underclass would amplify existing contradictions in the "uppity left" to the point that it would tear itself apart and stop functioning as a coherent political force (as indeed it did, with all the anti-elite energy having been successfully redirected into a war between those who are horrified at immigrants and those who are horrified at the preceding group), and they probably bargained that no comparable threat to them could emerge from the right (which anyhow they had good experience and infrastructure to manage).
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17d ago
I'd take the case against international law more seriously here if there were any politically significant actors who abstained on principle from invoking it to condemn their geopolitical enemies as well. I find the rank hypocrisy morally more revolting than any object-level "violation of international law".
Nice catch. I also thought that the use of "effortposting" in the first paragraph is strange (contextually it seems like the insinuation should be that Europeans are working themselves into a rage or similar). It would make sense if the prompt included something about "effortposts", and the expression just wound up weaselling itself into an LLM-generated response as tends to happen.
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