ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
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User ID: 626
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
And yet, somehow the state of Russia is explained by a lack of democratic norms.
Dude literally picked the only country in the region that didn't have an authoritarian "back"slide at the time.
What is this meant to be a reference to please? Czechoslovakia? Because there was no reversion to authoritarianism in that case.
Estonia? Latvia? Lithuania? Poland? Romania? Bulgaria? Hungary? And yes, contrary to what you said below Germany also counts, of course. I'm almost impressed how you put your finger on the single country in the region that did not revert to authoritarianism, and are acting flabbergasted how I could possibly think they're not representative.
The "democratic tradition", the way the term is being used nowadays, of western Europe is more a result of the Cold War and it's alliance with the USA, than it does with anything that happened before the war. Even Spain and Portugal were dictatorships until the 70's.
The Asian Tiger route was a str ictly Southeast Asian (Confucian) phenomenon in the specific context of the Cold War and facilitated by generous and targeted American capital investment and the proto version of offshoring. None of that applied to Eastern Europe after 1989.
Whether or not it would work is another question (and the explanation of why it worked for Asia is another liberal just-so story that they had to scramble for after the fact, as they do with many things), all I'm saying is that it was an idea floated by public intellectuals at the time, although ultimately not attempted.
It was all a long-term consequence of German 'reunification' (the annexation of the former GDR into an unchanged federal state structure) being a complete shitshow which incidentally the Americans played no part in.
First of all it's worth reiterating that the "it" is "people voting the wrong way", something that clearly shows the "democratic traditions" are a cruel joke.
As to the causes, I mean, maybe? I could imagine that if the reunification went well the east Germans could be bread-and-circused into complacency, and would be just fine with brilliant ideas like importing seven zillion Syrians and Afghans, putting people in prison for speech, but locking them in a women's cell after they declare themselves a woman, and fining people €10K for misgendering them, but it's not immediately obvious to me. The psyops ran by the Americans on their western counterparts are legendary, to the point that anyone coming from a country with any amount of healthy patriotism comes away shaken after seeing the end result of what they were put through.
The basic idea is that you need intelligent high-agency people to win / get anything done, and so movements should try to appeal to such people rather than alienate them.
I don't even think the basic idea is wrong per-se, but the people putting it forward tend to insist, in a childish Joffrey Baratheoneque way, that they are the Elite Human Capital that needs to be appealed to, and so you must do their bidding, They also seem unaware that even if they were accepted as such, it would come with it's share of duties and responsibilities to their followers. I'd also quibble about the appeal / alienate thing, because the EHCs are very anxious about their status, and can be arm-twisted to do your movement's bidding.
Enslaving human mind uploads is in a similar ballpark of eminently sensible economic decisions.
(...) What humans might have instead are UBI
If the minds can't support themselves economically, they obvious incentive is to pull the plug on them, so you don't have to pay them UBI anymore.
or pre-existing investments on which they can survive.
Then the incentive becomes: manipulate the emulations to sign away the rights to their investments, and then pull the plug.
Not necessarily. I think you're well aware of my concerns about automation-induced unemployment, with most if not all humans becoming economically unproductive. Mind uploads are unlikely to change that.
Yes, and I consider most of them to be poorly made, and unresponsive to the most basic criticisms.
Even small sums held before a Singularity could end up worth a fortune due to how red-hot the demand for capital would be
You can't start your criticism with "there's very little reason to think that reality will pan out that way.", and then say something like this. I do not grant any claims of "the singularity" happening a single shred of legitimacy, unless it comes with solid supporting evidence. I grant even less legitimacy to any claims about what will happen to pre-singularity investments, any such claims are pure fan-fic.
No. Because, in both scenarios, they're obsolete, and little that you can do to make mind uploads cheaper won't apply to normal AI, which already start at an advantage.
(...) Once again, if you have tractors, the market for horse-rustling falls through the bottom.
Then follow the logic of the analogy a bit further. Do we see massive horse farms where we devote insane amounts of resources for the horses amusement? Or are the horses we do keep there for our amusment?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
While a very nice scifi story, there's very little reason to think that reality will pan out that way.
I wouldn't call the history of every invention to be "very little reason".
The answer is obvious: the person being uploaded. You and me. People who don't want to die. This completely flips the market dynamic. We are not the product; we are the clients. The service being sold goes from "cognitive labor" to "secure digital immortality." In this market, companies would compete not on how efficiently they can exploit Ems, but on how robustly they can protect them.
How do these emulations get the resources to pay the companies for the service of protection? Presumably they work, no? How does a company make money? By getting more clients? If yes, why compete for the limited amount of clients, when you can just copy-paste them? We're already seeing a similar dynamic with meatsack humans and immigration, it strikes me as extremely naive to think it would happen less if we make it easier and cheaper.
There is no profit motive behind enslaving and torturing them.
Slavery ensures profit, torture ensures compliance.
Took a quick look at a few of those it's pretty much what I expected. A lot less "the facts he's basing his case on are objectively false" and a lot more "I don't like his framing". Though to be fair GGS isn't that good about making a facts-based case, and tries to make up for it with storytelling, so... fair enough I guess?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
IDK why you thought that:
Quotes like this:
Cannabis is even easier tho...
or this:
That marijuana is even than this! People are growing it illegally right now!
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Not sure how you get from "Bill got a letter in the mail" to reasonable suspicion?
How about "Getting the contact info for Bill's supplier the same way Bill did, ordering some seeds, using that as evidence to raid the supplier, and getting the addresses of his clients"?
in which case "I just like to keep my fruit in a carboy" isn't going to do you any more good than "I thought those were tomato seeds".
the "left some fruit in a cabinet" line was not an example of the legal defense you'd use once busted, it was pointing out how easy it is to make alcohol out of completely legal ingredients.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Almost nothing is specific to any one group, especially when we're dealing with groups as broad as "right" and "left", but I do think it's ugly and getting uglier on the right.
I'm saying it's bizarre to single the right out when there was a general raise of "antisemitic" sentiment, and a big part of the current vibe shift was Jewish people responding to the left's reaction to 10/7 .
And it's broader than racism. For instance, I'm closer to Trace's side than I am to Auron's in this exchange, and so I don't want our politics to go down the path Trace is arguing against.
I assure you Trace is no stranger to deploying shame against people he disapproves of. In fact, I don't think you can have a functioning society without shame.
If he (or you) wants to argue that everyone needs to act like trans aspect of trans people should be completely ignored in all contexts not related to sex, he can knock himself out, but I don't see any vitriol in rejecting the concept of transgenderism, and guarding against your movement being eternally trapped in the progressive frame.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
The facts it got objectively wrong aren't accepted as objectively wrong by anyone except online far-right autists. My impression is that it got depracated because it was meant to be compatible with 90's liberalism, which itself got depracated.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
but the basic point is valid: the Online Right, insofar as I casually track its movements on Twitter, emphasizes HBD less than it used to.
Liberals used to explicitly believe that their belief system is justified by science, and anything that contradicts it must be not only morally, but factually wrong. This was the background for the rise of the HBD conversation, trying to own those stupid racists by showing how scientifically illiterate they are. After they crashed into that particular wall, head first, several times, and noticed it ain't budging, they decided to avoid the conversation altogether, which is why it also lost a lot of it's utility for the right. It's not even limited to this particular topic, there's a broader trend that Dave Green calls "the death of discourse".
There's a kind of coarser, more vitriolic type of racism and anti-semitism emerging to take its place.
This isn't even specific to the right.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
So why are you asking if people remember something that they're reminding you of?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Anyone remember that whole "HBD" thing? You don't hear much about it anymore.
It's literally being debated in the post before yours...
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
I might be missing something, but I think this disproves your claim rather then proves it? There being a mix of both does not imply that Israel's influence rests on their ability to make the US leadership generally do something against their will.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Yeah, but I thought you were arguing that controlling weed is harder relative to controlling alcohol, and I'm not seeing it.
Also, if potency is just about the female flower thing, how come it increased around the time of it's normalization / legalization? Doesn't that imply that attempts to ban it are actually keeping the potency down?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Gotta say that looks quite cool!
You probably explained it earlier, but I don't recall catching it, is there any particular reason you're doing rendering from scratch (are you? that's the impression I'm getting)? Just to learn how the stuff works?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Little to tinkering this week, maybe some bugfixes. How are you doing @Southkraut?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
No, more like putting the fruit in some sort of carboy, adding yeast, monitoring fermentation, etc -- do you really think it would not have been possible to charge somebody for doing this during prohibition based on the "I just like to store my fruit that way" defense?
Yes? If nothing else, a reasonable suspicion that someone bought the seeds of an illegal plant make it much easier to get a search warrant, compared to "we saw him buying some fruit the other day". Is it yeast you want to control? The stuff is literally floating in the air. Is it jars and buckets you're planning to criminalize, or are you planning to catch them red-handed in the middle of the onerous task of "monitoring fermentation", also known as "not doing anything, and checking if the thing is still making bubbles after a couple days"?
On one hand I'll repeat my broken-record line of "don't damn peoples down seven generations", and even though I think genetic group differences are a thing, I'm much more skeptical of sweeping statements about specific groups being incapable organizing in of specific political systems. On the other hand, this is a liberal just-so story that glosses over anything inconvenient, and invents several convenient "facts" to salvage it's own argument.
they all have some past legacy of applied democratic norms, rule of law, parliamentary systems
Ah yes, the long rich democratic tradition of the 20 years between the World Wars, that were imposed by Woodrow Wilson's deranged fantasies, and managed to revert to authoritarianism even within that short timespan. The attachment to democracy was so short that we were seriously debating if it's not better to take the Asian Tiger route, and only implement democracy after authoritarian reforms.
And the question of whether the area of the former GDR was ‘properly’ democratized or not is seemingly an ever thornier one on the minds of West German normies.
Which only shows how democracy is a luxury system. It can work if the stars align just right, but has the tendency of taking it's necessary conditions (like everybody having roughly the same values) for granted. The moment these conditions are not met the democracy enjoyers themselves will start begging for it's end, arresting opposition candidates, and seriously considering the banning of political parties, for the high crime of people voting the wrong way.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
I agree that banning it is hard, and probably impossible to completely stamp out, given it's current prevalence, but I think it's easier to target a specific plant, than literally all sources of sugar, water, and yeast.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
"Hilarious! You're fired."
Anything plausibly resembling "I left some fruit in a cabinet" is likely to be barely drinkable by desperate college students (I should know), nevermind better than what you get in a store.
It is true that my direct experience with the production of alcohol is with beer, and my experience in the consumption of homemade wine boils down to someone else having made it, but I just looked up some basic recipes and it is, in fact, basically "I left some fruit in a cabinet". Maybe the homemade wine I tasted had a more involved production process, but being familiar with the process of fermenting alcohol, I honestly doubt it.
As for quality, The idea that "better than in a store" is a hard bar to clear strikes me as absurd. Whether it's beer or wine, I swear they're putting something in it that leaves you with an unpleasant aftertaste, which homebrew just does not have.
If you want to insist that good beer is somehow easier to make than good wine (I'm far from an expert, but the proposition sounds extremely counter-intuitive to me), we can settle it relatively easy, I'll just make some, and tell you if I liked it.
Ah yes, the great genocide of 1920 -- how could I have forgotten?
Did in fact cause lots of deaths via crime. It didn't escalate to genocide, because they weren't actually stamping out the ownership and production of any and all alcohol. What am I missing?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
I should have been more specific; I am referring to the Iranian government.
That's how I understood it, and I still don't know what's supposed to be so uncivilized about the Iranian government.
Agreed except for the last sentence. You're taking token western institutions to pretend there were democratic norms, and (rightfully) dismissing the token Russian ones. Even if you want to carve out Germany as an exception that was somehow actually democratic, deep in their hearts (I can even give you "rule of law" as an institution that they had, to be a good sport), that still does not salvage your argument for why the democratization of the Eastern Block was a success. You even have to invent additional just-so stories to explain the relative "failure" of the democratization of the GDR, even though they it should have been the most successful of all, if "democratic traditions" were so important, and existed in Germany for such a long time.
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