Corvos
6d ago
From that post:
one would naively expect that successful actors, musicians etc. would be incentivised to discourage others from pursuing careers in their domain, or engage in rent-seeking behaviour like guilds and so on. But there may be an alternative dynamic at play, in which moderately talented actors, musicians etc. are savvy enough to know that flooding the market with talentless hacks will make the legitimately talented stand out all the more — tall poppies look all the taller when surrounded by short ones
Surely they are simply smart enough to know that:
- They are already established and can't easily be threatened by people only now beginning a career (similar to those advocating DEI).
- They know that their fans will respond much better to "we've all been there, keep plugging," than to "dude, sorry, chances are you can't do what I can do".
I don't know how to say this but you're the richest and most powerful people in the world. This kind of discussion always turns into a Bravery Debate but regulation like GDPR is more about clawing back some agency from America than it is trying to tax US industry.
As the Right discovered five years ago, and the Left discovered when Musk bought X, network effects and the overall stack just don't allow for 'make-your-own' social media.
(I don't actually like or agree with the vast majority of this regulation, though I think that GDPR specifically was a step in the right direction of forcing companies to give more than absolutely zero shits about the privacy of their customers).
Normally I wouldn't be quite so thin-skinned but the Greenland fiasco drove home for me just how worrying it is that half of the most powerful country in the world thinks of us as being essentially a pantomime villain from a Mel Gibson movie.
That is the same thing that I said, in much more polemical language, but it's only part of the story. Yes, various European and non-American (Aussie, UK, Canada) governments are very upset that, from their perspective, unfortunate dirty laundry is being aired in public. Some of them surely have things they would like to hide, others rightly or wrongly believe that the country would be better off and less febrile if matters weren't presented in a maximally inflammatory way and optimised for engagement.
But there are also lots of other things that people are concerned about. They really don't like the effect that addictive Instagram and TikTok etc. are having on the ability of young people to concentrate or socialise, they don't like Grok in general and the nudifying features in particular, etc.
Ultimately, both voters and governments generally prefer for regulation to be possible, even if they decide not to do it. Having a big part of life subject to the whims of Washington and Silicon Valley rubs people the wrong way.
No, the obvious answer is the true one here. Europe and the UK really really hate that the fundamental, society-altering technology that all of their citizens are using >5hrs a day is completely out of their control, as is the AI that they are hoping will become the new basis of their economy. And they are fundamentally incapable of conceiving that the answer might be less regulation rather than more. The closest American example is when America legislated the sale of TikTok (did that ever go through?).
I personally have mixed feelings about this. Having your public places under the control of another country is in some ways safer than having them under the control of your own country - broadly I like that Musk can tell Starmer to take a long walk off a short pier. But this cuts both ways, and I don't blame the various governments involved for being antsy around it.
Corvos
7d ago
On which note, @ZanarkandAbesFan I have to ask, are you a fan of
- Zanarkand Abe
Or
- Zanark and Abe?
I’ve always wondered.
It seems to me that a tall man who isn’t allowed to decide when and where and if he fetches things for shorter people is just a step-ladder made of meat.
What if there are 10 Alice’s who genuinely need things fetched down on a constant basis?
What if there’s only one Alice but she abuses him and makes her dislike of him known on a regular basis?
What if Alice and her fellow shorties have subjected Bob to a constant campaign of psychological manipulation since birth explaining that his tallness is a privilege to be used for the benefit of the short, or indeed that his tallness is actively oppressing them by causing shelves to be built which they can’t reach, for which he must repent by serving them in the manner they demand?
In many of these scenarios Bob appeared to be… let’s not call him a slave to avoid the noncentral fallacy, but certainly slavelike. Similar to an indentured servant.
In practice, what seems to happen is that ‘we’ or ‘society’ determine how much labour Bob is required to do for the underprivileged (in our benevolence). In which case Bob is not only their servant but even more so ours.
Civilisation does require this to some degree but the scales have tipped far too far in the last hundred years and the racial version has finally tipped far enough that all of us are Bob and we’re sick of it.
Corvos
8d ago
Muslims are clannish and always vote for muslims. Non-muslims won't not vote for muslims. Left-wingers would rather vote for Saddam Hussein than a right-wing party.
Of course, I was just surprised and wanted to check in case I was totally misinformed.
Incidentally, there are some cases where the loser doesn't have to pay costs, the most egregious of which is that if you are supported by public aid (mostly immigrants being supported by legal charities) you're theoretically poor and you don't have to pay even if a) you cause the other party to pay millions in damages or costs and b) your sponsors are rolling.
The UK's loser-pays-winner paradigm isn't perfect. My family were put off pursuing a perfectly-winnable claim because we had a 95% chance of winning but we would bankrupt ourselves trying to pay for the other side's top-tier legal team on the 5% chance we lost.
Corvos
10d ago
the winning side in a dispute has to pay the reasonable legal costs of the losing side
That's completely wrong, isn't it? In the UK, the loser pays the costs of the winner. It's very very rare to pay the costs of the winner unless their behaviour is incredibly egregious.
Corvos
10d ago
I was writing a post and noticed that the native form of @Person references is https://www.themotte.org/id/NUM, so I amused myself by finding out who was the very first genuine user of www.themotte.org.
IDs one through eight are bots of different kinds, and 9 is Zorba himself. Then you get a lot of 404s which I'm assuming were temporary IDs generated for testing. You don't get a real ID until number 42.
Congratulations @JulianRota ! As far as I can tell, you are the very first ever legitimate user of this site.
From the stuff I read:
https://unherd.com/newsroom/eu-is-spearheading-the-new-global-axis-of-censorship/
https://unherd.com/newsroom/banning-x-will-not-make-anyone-safer/
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/07/30/can-elon-musk-beat-the-eu-censors/
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/05/27/the-eus-empire-of-censorship/
Plus later:
https://unherd.com/2025/11/the-eus-new-censorship-machine/
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/25/the-eu-wants-to-censor-the-global-internet/
Broadly, it would be a mistake to:
-
Treat the behaviour of the EU and especially Thierry Breton as representative of the mass political will of normal Europeans. Broadly there is some correlation but the EU is famously non-democratic, and Thierry Breton is an unelected EU Commissioner. The former president of the EU Commission once said in public re: referendums, “If it's a Yes, we will say 'on we go', and if it's a No we will say 'we continue'.” The anti-democratic behaviour of the EU puts the American Deep State to shame.
-
Treat the behaviour of the EU as being about America rather than Europe. Yes, they loathe Trump and they really don't want him in the White House, and they know Americans who encourage them in this feeling and beg / order them to do something about it. But even then, they are far more worried about X encouraging populism at home, plus they are partially responding to (some) voters concerns about social media in general. They wouldn't like X any more if it were Australian. It would be far more sensible to disengage, but because of network effects and general shitness, Europe has totally failed to make its own social media (with exceptions for some countries like I think Finland ( @Stefferi ?) and cannot do so without blanket banning American social media like China does, which is not in the Overton window. Thus the increasing prevalence of stuff like the UK Online Safety law and these attempts to regulate foreign social media in the same way they would regulate local companies.
Corvos
10d ago
Sorry, I didn't mean that as a refutation, more as a 'people did, but not from where one might expect'.
Corvos
11d ago
maybe the silver lining will be that the left realizes the need for strong 2nd Amendment rights to protect against "Nazi Authoritarian Governments"
Your position is internally consistent. I don’t think I agree - the costs in death and internal disorder seem concrete to me while the benefits seem more theoretical - but that’s by the by.
I know this isn't your argument and that tortured lefties make stupid arguments but they get away with it because no one shuts them down.
I did shut it down, at some personal cost. But you cannot prove the assertion that ‘you are not being forced to go to that party and its existence does not constitute a restriction on you’ to somebody who claims that refusing to change the theme after their complaint is now a positive choice to exclude them.
It’s power against power, vote against vote, and sadly you don’t always have the power or win the vote.
Corvos
11d ago
Yes, but the problem is that anything can be defined as a negative right given sufficient desire. In this case it was the right not to be deeply harmed and re-traumatised by the rape culture inherent in celebrating the life of a man who once slept with an underage groupie (yes, that was the literal argument). Trans people have the right not to be genocided by people using the wrong pronoun. Etc. etc.
The 2nd amendment very clearly is designed, in part, for an organized militia, so this is about an unamerican statement as it comes.
Fair's fair, you got me. I'm a Brit who regards the American bill of rights as being broadly an insane document drafted by some intelligent but rather blinkered revolutionaries who could not conceive of an America 100/200/300/400 years old. It worked sort of okay for ruling a small number of extremely patriotic, highly confederated Anglo Americans but survived beyond that through a combination of unusual geography and very selective reading and interpretation, which is the Federal Government imposes limits on speech every day, why it interferes in commerce, etc.
None of which is a refutation of your point, of course. I do note that said militia would be fairly unlikely to support 2nd amendment rights as pursued by say the NRA.
That sounds an awful lot like you can murder anyone you want as long as they're a political enemy whose agenda can be framed in terms of 'rights' however nebulously. (All of them can.)
I am reminded of the activist who told me with tears in his eyes that throwing a David Bowie themed party constituted violence against the victims of sexual assault.
Moreover are you prepared to accept that, since you are clearly advocating for violence against those you disapprove of, it is entirely valid to gun down you yourself on the same principle?
With regards to the anti-ICE movement, it is very clearly an organised militia and no sane country could or should permit such behaviour to continue.
Corvos
11d ago
in the heart of silicone valley
I look forward to hearing more about the darkness of the cosmetic surgery industry.
Corvos
13d ago
If you are into such things, might I recommend Genius: The Transgression?
A Game of Forbidden Science:
Break the rules and you get in trouble. Break the law and you go to jail. Mouth off to your boss and lose your job. Jump off a building and...But it doesn't have to be that way, says that little voice in the back of your head, your personal genius. You ignore it, but you can't silence it. But a genius gives in to that voice, becomes that rules-breaking thing, that maker-trickster-savior, and begins a life of pain and glory unimaginable to mere mortals.
The genius sees the truth, but she cannot get there. In her heart she knows, but she cannot explain why. She flouts social convention, ignores the sneering voice of authority and dogma, and casts aside the ethical concerns of her peers. She breaks the rules of the universe we know to glimpse the truth of the universe as it must be. But there's a price. There always is. She is not just isolated from the "common man," but from the very discipline that birthed her. In her heart, she knows that what she does is not science, which is ultimately about systems and about cooperation. Alone, she walks a new path, wearing the trappings of her old life but no longer capable of touching its essence.
Genius: The Transgression takes place in the World of Darkness, a world like ours but with darker nights and deeper stains. People don't connect to one-another as they do in our world. They live in the shadows of ancient conspiracies and the shadows cast by old things, and this infects the geniuses: for every mad scientist working in silicon and plastic, another labors with greasy cogs and steam pumps, while another never left behind the gleaming chrome and atomic dreams of the 1950s. For one of the Inspired, there is no escape from the fetters of superstition and occult dread, the lurking horrors at the edge of consciousness. Though cobbling together elements from our past, the genius ultimately belongs to no place and no time, and walks alone into the future.
Theme: Transgression
A little knowledge is a hideous thing and it will drive you mad.
The genius is a rule-breaker, a trickster, a liar, a thief of wonders, and a maker of false dreams. Tenuous threads bind him to the mortal world, and every wonder is a violation of the rules of the universe. On the one hand, Obligation binds a genius to humanity; on the other hand, Inspiration tells him to do things that no sane person would ever want to do. The genius can be humanity's damned savior, destroying himself to safeguard a society that will never know his name and would hate him if they knew what he had done to preserve them. A genius is never entirely in control. His inventions are always one step away from freeing themselves and rampaging through his lab, or his city. The ideas and dreams come too fast for him to write down, let alone study and examine. The deadlines are constant, the pressure to find equipment, money, and research time mind-breaking, and humiliation is a constant companion. Mad scientists burn with a passion for their work, and though that passion is glorious and often contagious, the hunger to know and to control consumes them from the inside-out. They cannot obey the rules that normal society has set down for its members. They can only choose what laws they will break, and how they will look at themselves afterward.
Mood: Bitter Disappointment
The hideous freedom of transgression is matched by the choke-chain of necessity. A genius finds herself surrounded by failure and broken dreams. For every wonder that lurches, blasphemously, beautifully, to life, another turns to smoking scrap in the testing phase, or lies forgotten in a corner, half-made, because the genius couldn't pay for the right permits or find the right materials. This juxtaposition of Inspired triumph and mundane failure defines a genius' life.
And even if the genius succeeds more often than he fails, he sees dead dreams all around him. Once-great geniuses, their radiance reduced to cinders from a lifetime of crushing defeat and humiliation, stock the shelves at the electronics store in the mall, too ashamed to take up the wrench again. Those Inspired who provide a genius with the supplies he needs are hollow, miserable people, chewed apart by the failure of their philosophies to gain acceptance. And in the end, rare is the genius who makes a measurable impact on the world: no matter how successful a genius might be, his wonders still crumble when exposed to the light of day, reduced to malfunctioning piles of components. Many of the Inspired, after that initial burst of delight, feel the circle of possibilities shrinking around them, until they are little different from before, except that now people who once respected them now snicker behind their back at the "maniac" who cracked under the stress.
To be fair, I tried out F as a Brit for fun / as a private in-joke post Brexit and I did like it and I still use it for weather, though I wouldn't use it scientifically.
Anne of Green Gables
Little Women(? I haven’t read it).
Jane Eyre
A Room of One's Own (we're starting to get explicitly feminist here so maybe doesn't count)
Corvos
15d ago
This did sort of happen during COVID in a lot of places, though. Why people are storming your city and demanding to see your papers and making you feel afraid of going about your daily life, and whether you agree or disagree matters a lot to how you feel about it. Ultimately people's responses on all sides are going to be politically inflected.
I'm a little confused. Does Ireland not give birthright citizenship though the father's line? Or is it that he had the option to pass on citizenship rights as the father but refused, and claimed to be the mother which wasn't accepted?
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