Corvos
2hr ago
If you don't want to be beholden to the whims of Current Hegemon, the only way to guarantee that is to be roughly equivalent in overall power and capability to Current Hegemon.
I would say that this is not only legitimate but the right and proper aim of any nation. As opposed to the British strategy, which is to bleat endlessly about the ‘special relationship’ and hope America throws us some scraps.
Corvos
14hr ago
My theory is that it depends on reading speed. Slower readers (me in foreign languages) care more about sentence crafting because they spend more time with each sentence, whereas in English I am naturally a very fast reader and ‘reading’ a page is a bit like looking through a transparent pane glass.
@Amadan, how much time would you spend on one of Martin’s books, if you don’t mind my asking?
The idea that Russia is about to sweep Europe is ridiculous.
Fortunately I did not making an argument premised on that idea, having mocked the premise myself in the past, nor do my characterizations depend on people subscribing to that idea.
I wasn’t intending to make a personal comment, I hope it didn’t come off that way. I have a deep contempt and loathing for the Powers That Be in our current age, and it shows.
I do seriously think people who should know better are subscribing to this belief, however.
took with its the values and norms its leaders might have contributed (such as a stronger British political tradition of adherence to democratic practices at governing-party expense).
In all sincerity, I appreciate the sentiment.
They disliked them, they tried to restrain them in various ways, they will be happy to see Orban go, but even the EU was able to acknowledge free elections it disliked.
For a given value of ‘acknowledge’. If my colleague is promoted over me and I dedicate myself to getting them fired, I don’t think that counts as genuine ‘acknowledgement’ of the situation. It is merely a recognition that the cost-benefit ratio of publicly disputing it is bad.
I do not think the EU ever had any intention of acknowledging these elections as genuinely legitimate, it merely thought it could do to Orban what it did to the Greek radicals previously, and failed.
My model of European establishment behaviour is that its increasingly open authoritarianism has less to do with fear of Russia, which I don’t think is a genuine concern outside Eastern Europe, and more to do with the escalating failure of institutional soft power to squash emergent challengers. Even in Romania (unlike Poland, say), I don’t think that these judges are operating out of terror of a Putin invasion but out of hatred and contempt for their rivals, and a desire to show that Romania is no longer That Sort Of Country.
Some Europeans, especially in Eastern Europe, are genuinely concerned by Russia. Others (including many politicians and newspaper writers I read) are blowhards who switch seamlessly between "Ukraine is losing, we must send missiles so they can resist" and "Ukraine is winning, we must send missiles so they can finish the job" depending on the latest reports. The idea that Russia is about to sweep Europe is ridiculous.
Personally, I think there is a pretty sizeable contingent of Europeans whose performative fear of Russia is driven by the usefulness of being able to suppress dissident parties and call local dissent 'Russian misinformation'. It may well be that they have convinced themselves, of course. But in my personal circle (UK) anti-Putin sentiment is driven far more by disgust than fear.
We know that the EU leadership elite has a capacity to accept the elections of governments that they strongly dislike- see the Poland PIS and Orban-
They most certainly do not.
and we are now seeing differences in behavior that correspond in differences to attribution.
We are now seeing increasingly bald authoritarianism due to their failures to destroy right-wing governments in more subtle fashion - financially and procedurally. Plus the looming threat of populism in their own countries driven by their absolute failure and arrogant incompetence.
I’m fine with tariffs or industrial policy. Those strike me as ‘fair’ cards to play, preserving and/or improving your own industry. (I don’t approve of China’s dumping either fwiw).
What I don’t like is the idea that America should economically and/or militarily destroy anyone who might ever become its peer. I am not interested in living under a tyrant to protect me from living under a tyrant.
I don’t think you have to write a didactic piece with an explicit moral (making sure to whack the readers over the head a few times in case they weren’t paying attention).
However, I assert that any reasonably competent work is going to convey something, and I think it matters what that is. I don’t like books whose soul feels ugly, to put it as unhelpfully as possible.
(Some books convey “the real world is far too complex and messy to convey anything” but that’s still a message to me).
I think that actually a lot of people do need the reminder that even the most lofty ideals and heroic rhetoric is ultimately describing a series of mundane, gross, and often brutish Things Happening. Part of Martin’s whole project is to showcase the dramatic irony between, on the one hand, the lofty chivalric self-image and self-importance of the power players involved, and, on the other hand, the grubby and venal motives underlying it, and the hideous reality of the real-world outcomes of all of that rhetoric. He’s forcing the reader to stare straight into the abyss of that discrepancy, rather than escaping into the fantastical good-and-evil stories which still dominate so much of the fantasy novel oeuvre.
A fair point. Maybe people do need to hear this, and I’m stuck in the echo chamber of 2000s cynicism which permitted nothing that was good or true to exist. But I’m not sure it’s true, and I’m not sure that the people who need to hear it (e.g. fanatical NATO or EU flagwavers IMO) are hearing it. Personally I couldn’t continue with Martin after Ned Stark was executed, my spirit rebelled.
Corvos
1d ago
Pretty sure that the US has been trying to expand into Russia and China for the last half century.
To quote @netstack
The legacy of WWII was that you don’t have to literally occupy a territory to get value from it. Set up the right rules, and the subsequent international order serves your interests.
The US is very keen to make Russia and China follow US rules, and I'm pretty sure they would bring about regime change if they could.
Corvos
1d ago
Without being an expert, I would be dubious about assassinating someone with a killbot. Even if you make it self-destructing, it would be so easy to accidentally contaminate it - to leave some data from when you flashed it, or for your activation signal to be registered on the wifi / phone / satellite network you use. It may well be possible, but you would need institutional knowledge like Mossad probably has to reliably pull it off.
Like any famous author, Sanderson has leaned a bit too far into the aspect of his work he’s famous for - all the magic systems stuff - and he tries slightly too hard to be topical. But his early work is fantastic, especially the first Mistborn series, and his later work is often good too.
Beyond all that, though, he was special to me as a modern fantasy author who didn’t seem corrupted by the nihilism of our age. He wrote about princes genuinely trying to be good leaders, priests in a corrupt priesthood losing and regaining their faith, how to trust in your friends when you have no guarantee that they won’t let you down.
It’s not so simple. Japan was already modernising: the period between the end of the shogunate and WW2 is basically Japan speed-running the Enlightenment. The Americans made the very sensible choice to avoid provoking excess resentment by leaving Emperor Hirohito alive and allowing them to preserve many of their existing traditions in new forms: ken-jutsu (an art of war) became ken-do (a school sport), and so on. So they didn’t feel they were losing more than they had already lost by adopting American ways.
Beyond that, much of Japan’s liberalisation is potemkin - the same party has been in charge for the vast majority of the last seventy years, the police has very broad discretion and prosecution will rubber-stamp anything they do.
The Japanese mostly copied America because America looked worth copying: it was huge and rich and advanced, and everything Japan felt it out to be. Plus the road of imperial conquest was now closed to them, so they chose the next best option.
The main thing that has changed is that liberal countries are no longer unquestionably worth imitating. Europe is increasingly poor despite being liberal, China is increasingly rich despite being culturally illiberal.
EDIT: interesting, completely the opposite perspective from @MaiqTheTrue
Corvos
1d ago
I'm not usually conspiratorial but I wouldn't be at all surprised if this were a hit disguised as a revenge killing. The detail of the slogan scratched on the bullet casings is just that bit too melodramatic, it doesn't fit the stone cold killer vibe.
Corvos
2d ago
There is a good paper called Embers of Regression which basically points out that LLMs do not have a consistent intellect. Their ability to perform tasks such as “Write the following in word-reversed order” will change markedly depending on whether the result is a sane/common string or not. So trying to get novel material is hard.
I can’t answer your riddles, I’m afraid. I was never good at puzzles.
Corvos
2d ago
I am basically this guy. Although I was raised culturally Church of England, my parents and intellectual climate growing up were utterly atheist. After spending my formative years in an environment where real belief was both ridiculous and infra dig, I am no longer capable of genuine faith.
I can consider myself Christian intellectually, but except through a miracle I will never be able to have the true faith that others have, and my little faith will never console me or sustain me against the secular gods that I worship despite myself. So it goes. I can only try to do better for the next generation.
Corvos
2d ago
There are always dissatisfied factions in any country. As the country’s condition worsen, dissenting factions become stronger, but I’m pretty sure foreign support can significantly affect: a) which dissenting faction ends up on top, b) whether they’re strong enough to beat the existing government.
These things are exponential, like avalanches, or pandemics. That’s why repression almost always aims to wipe out dissidents when they’re weak and isolated.
It seems entirely plausible to me that no US support = no Maidan revolution.
Corvos
2d ago
The Populares must cease to exist. Because they only exist in their opposition to the Optimates, and vice versa.
You deserve a better, longer reply but to be brief, I don’t think this is true. There are real, concrete issues at stake: who is allowed into the country, who is allowed to control cultural bottlenecks like Twitter or academia, the relative privileges and duties of men and women, whether we need to destroy our economy with unilateral green policies, and so on.
Tony Blair actually tried what you suggest: he began mass migration to, in the words of his advisor, “rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date”. But I consider myself a British nativist populist. If you attempt to render the Culture War irrelevant by flattening the differences between natives and newcomers, I lose by default. So I can’t back that. This is what I mean when I say I want victory not peace.
Another example would be transgenders vs TERFs. There are currently irreconcilable differences between the TERF wish for single sex spaces without men, and the trans wish to be invited into single sex spaces for women. You can render this conflict irrelevant by ceasing to consider women as meaningfully different from men, or considering trans ‘women’ as equivalent to women, but either is a loss for the TERF faction.
Corvos
3d ago
Why is China now the world capital of industry? Because we let them build up earlier as opposed to hammering them back when they were weak.
Or in other words, because American industry couldn’t compete with Chinese industry on an even footing. I’m open to tariffs and other things but the idea that America should pre-emptively destroy anyone who looks like they might be able to do better is not one that brings me joy.
There can't be any reds and blues anymore.
But that’s saying that to destroy the enemy, we have to destroy ourselves.
It’s a bit like the school I mentioned once in the UK where, to avoid religious conflicts between children, everyone is forbidden from praying and all meals are vegetarian. I grew up Church of England. I resent having to give up my religious practices because newcomers are causing trouble. I don’t want to stop the Culture War, I want to win it, at least in my local area.
But I wouldn't even attempt to prosecute the people staffing the old decrepit system. Just let them go. Ignore them. Make their protests a meaningless antiquated impotent gesticulation that has no effect or meaning.
I agree with this otoh.
Corvos
3d ago
Perhaps he couldn’t find enough sympathetic allies to staff his martial government. So it was a choice between surrendering or being betrayed by his own people. Or perhaps someone he trusted genuinely argued him out of it.
But I thought it was weird too. I thought the same about the Russian coup - you know Putin’s never going to let you live, why not go out fighting? Perhaps fighting to the death isn’t selected for by evolution.
Corvos
4d ago
We’re less than 20 years from the vast majority of labor being automated by AI and robots.
I beat this drum on occasion but we absolutely aren’t. I’m directly involved with this sort of thing and absent a paradigm-shifting in improvement and robot hardware (possible but far from guaranteed) we cannot practically automate much more than is already automated.
AI is a probabilistic inference machine. It’s not suitable for doing physical tasks with a high degree of accuracy at >99.9% success rate. At 1 part per 6 seconds, even that figure means a line failure every 1000 parts ie. about once every 2 hours.
And robot hardware isn’t up to performing constant physical work with soft bodies like cloth or complex shapes. Anything more complex than a suction gripper or pinching fingers has failed to take off in a factory setting because it’s not reliable enough or because it wears out too quickly.
Lawyers (at least by their own reckoning) are difficult to bill. If they spend 2 hours writing a letter that convinces the opposition to give up a case worth $50bn, but they say they spent 200 hours researching in preparation, do you bill them for the time spent writing or the time spent researching, and how do you get proof of the latter?
In practice, corporate lawyers tend to be paid per job and per concrete action, but they charge huge amounts for those to offset the intangible/unprovable work done. The amount is basically a function of how much money is floating around the case.
Thus $50 billion turns into $300 million, of which the majority will go to the partners of the firm, and then to the taxman (at least in the UK) before it reaches the individual lawyers involved in the case. Still a very nice payout though.
Corvos
7d ago
But you also put down murderous dogs. Once they get that way, you can’t untrain it easily and there’s nothing to gain by imprisoning it.
Take a kindle? Less necessary now, maybe, but good to have lots of books.
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