Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being an insufferable reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man Fox News boomer. No one yet has guessed a scholar, or multiple people. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
Dean
Flairless
6mo ago
The default assumption was and still kind of has to be that the other person making judgements off of you is also rational.
Nuclear deterrence modeling fundamentally does not work if either party is irrational. It's a common failure mode both of the madman theory and the precautionary-compromise-to-alleviate-fear paradigms. Neither actually works if the external observer is genuinely irrational, both are selective choies of 'but if we do this thing, then they will become rational actors.'
I remembered that post fondly, but had forgotten the key-words or who it was from! Thank ye.
Separately / concurrently- given that the American Founding Fathers didn't predict the rise of political parties, and had to amend the constitution pretty early for the vice president kerfuffle, I think the 'did not necessarily understand the procedural implication of their own rules' is a fair critique.
In some respects they did- slowing the progress of government change in some respects- but that itself just locked in various self-catalyzing changes, like the New Deal coalition leading to the rise of the imperial presidency and administrative state that would compete with the chief executive.
Am I misreading anything with the MAD situation?
Yes. Quite a bit, but it starts with forgetting that nukes are controlled by people, and the people in half of this context are elected leaders of democracies, and the other half are leaders of polities as well, not the polity itself.
Democratically-elected politicians and parties like to be re-elected. They also like the idea of having a successful historical legacy even if they can't be re-elected. They also like being popular with their supporter base. They also like not dying in second-strike scenarios, but more relevant is that people who enjoy being popular, and the political prestige/esteem that comes with being popular, take being popular seriously. Even a 'successful' genocide tends to put a scupper in their support base opinion polls amongst people who don't like genocide but do put a lot of value in thinking of themselves as good people. Even if the elected leader is neither good nor shares that genocidal objection, their interest is being shaped by the third party reactions.
Similarly, no one 'thinks like' a multi-hundred year polity. This is because individual people don't live hundreds of years old. There are no ethnic gestalt consciousnesses that dominate decision-making. Even ideologues act according to their specific ideas as they understand them. This divide between the appeal to the mass consideration to the actual decisionmaker gets wider the more the political power differential is between elites and masses. Peasants don't dictate how aristocrats decide their own future- that's why one is a peasant and the other is an aristocrat in the first place.
As a result, the actor characterization stumbles over the rather basic question of- 'why?'
Nukes don't fire themselves. They are fired by people. People have motives. 'If I fire first, I could wipe the other side out with little to no response!' is not a motive. It is a literal statement, but not a serious statement. To be serious, it would have to deal with the consequences that actually shape decisionmaker- specific humans- behavior. It has to address 'why' that makes sense, not why it is mechanically possible.
Your misreading is also taking MAD elements literally, but not seriously. And this includes MAD itself.
The Mutual in MAD has never necessarily been mutually-received damage in scale or proportion. A for Assurance is not an assurance of any particular level of retaliatory destruction, and hasn't for as long as second-strike capability entered nuclear triads. The D of Destruction has likewise been 'too much of my own destroyed to be worth it,' rather than literal destruction of everyone and everything in internationally recognized borders of the aggressor.
None of these extreme measures are actually required for nuclear deterrence. All deterrence requires from the defender is enough of a cost to the attacker for the cost to outweigh the benefit to the attacker. This is true regardless of the outcome to the defender if the conflict actually occurs, because attackers choose to attack over their own prospects of success, not the defender's prospects of defeat. The two are not the same, and total target destruction does not make for total victory.
This matters to leaders because Republican President Name-not-Trumps-Alot is deterred even if retaliatory nuclear missiles 'only' wipe out a half-dozen Democratic-party cities. This is because the costs to President NNTA is greater than the political gain. In serious consideration, 'genocider of the Russian nation' or 'razed the swamp with nuclear weapons' aren't exactly Republican base applause lines when the nuclear weapons are kind of hurting them too, even if not as much directly. This cost is even greater for a Democratic President NNTA. They'd kind of like to keep winning, and it's kind of hard if your political machines and voter base are nuclear ash. The decision and incentive structure for rewarding such a decision to be serious rather than literal considerations have to be so extreme the scenario is no longer some ad-hoc out-of-the-blue alpha-strike scenario.
This literally versus seriously division continues with your decision on adopting certain positions.
Taking Russian claims on any sort of security, let alone nuclear, issue at face value is, uh, a way. But it's a take of taking them literally over seriously, given their historical rhetorical shifts on the subject. Similarly, it may be literally true that the Americans are capable of unspeakable hypocrisy and cruelty. However, it's not a particularly serious belief system that any given unspeakable act of cruelty and hypocrisy is a reasonable fear. Sincere if the holder is irrationally considering reality, perhaps, but not serious.
If you want to be serious about avoiding nuclear war, then you want to prioritize mitigating nuclear use risk, not mutually assured destruction. MAD is the distraction. Nuclear use is where it matters, because pre-emptive nuclear genocide is less relevant than someone thinking that tactical nuclear weapons won't have nuclear responses that could escalate.
Nuclear risk, in turn, is not minimized if you minimize nuclear fears at all costs.
This is because minimizing nuclear fears at all costs leads to directly incentivizing nuclear bluffs. Nuclear bluffs work by raising nuclear fears and inviting the other side to provide concessions in return for lowering the rhetoric/actions used to generate nuclear flear. Successful nuclear bluffs encourage incentivize further nuclear bluffs. Eventually, bluffs get called, which creates credibility tensions that incentivize actually using nuclear weapons. Nuclear use is what leads to nuclear retaliation.
You certainly don't want to work from an invented assumption that the nuclear opposites are desperate and failing as the starting status quo... especially if you have to simultaneously introduce irrationality to accept that starting premise.
Edit: And apparently this is the post dr_analog blocks me for?
Okay. And weird.
Dean
Flairless
6mo ago
LOGH is GOAT but there's really nothing else like it.
Amen.
Not internet-themed in the least. But great.
I’m not even sure that’s what they demonstrate. I’d argue that they’re more a result of lack of state capacity, and of a lack of alternate methods of adjudicating international disputes.
If I concede you this point in its totality, that yours is the interpretation they would take from common knowledge, would you then still say the American experiment would have been conducted in the same way?
I am going to skip forward a moment here-
Sure, we now know that states ostensibly influenced by the Enlightenment are still capable of waging massively destructive wars, at least under certain circumstances. If that’s supposed to discredit the entire philosophical undertaking, then I’m not sure what it would take to rehabilitate it in your eyes.
-and remind / prod you to remember the context of whose lack of current common knowledge is supposed to shape their decision. The people who would have to make the same decisions even with the advantage of the ahistorical common knowledge are the American founding fathers, not me. That would be 18th century merchant-class elites who identified with their home states more than a common american nationality that wouldn't exist for another hundred years or so.
If the common knowledge of the 20th century totalitarianism was as a descendent of the enlightenment was that 'this can be avoided if we give the state more capacity to centralize power and adjudicate inter-state disputes', do you think the then-independent states of the proto-United States would nod and agree to give up their sovereignty even harder, or do you think their delegations would have run from the negotiating chambers screaming? And then formed their own defense pacts against what was left of the early United States lest it impose such graciousness on them in the name of the common good?
Many of the compromises in the early American government were done to prevent a strong central government dominated by their political/economic rivals. This is why the Senate exists, to equalize power between weak and large states. This is why the 3/5ths compromise on the electoral power from slaves exists, to moderate the ability to dictate influence over interstate commerce rules development. This is why the bill of rights adds several more restrictions to boot, even though an argument against them is that they were so common-sense they shouldn't be needed.
Even then the formation of the American state as we know it was a near-run thing for already being too strong. The founders were fully cognizant of the benefits of centralized power. They were also highly distrustful of others having it over them. Half of the early government formation negotiations entailed some variation of 'that will never happen, that's crazy!'
Why, specifically, should such a group of power-sensitive, self-interested, and future-minded elites who had to be convinced this new government wouldn't one day overtake them give it more power, rather than less, in the name of avoiding... the consequences of too much state capacity and potential for abuse unless given?
Why would they not just re-look the Articles of Confederation, and go 'maybe we should just stick with that and tweak it instead'?
An awareness of the common knowledge of the Enlightenment's failure doesn't mean that the self-interested power-concerned slave-holders suddenly become 21st century progressives, anymore than knowledge of WW1 would mean George Washington would reverse his 'nah, don't get involved when the Europeans are killing themselves' stance.
Edit Cutting off later responses because they didn't really add much.
So, do all the pre-Enlightenment famines and mountains of skulls just… not count for anything?
Oh, they certain count... as support for Enlightenment paradigm when you lack an anchronistic (future-history) basis of comparison.
Pre-Enlightenment famines and mountains of skulls were demonstrative of a lack of Enlightenment. Failures in the early Enlightenment were proof of insufficient enlightenment. These are common knowledge that make Enlightenment paradigms look good- after all, no Enlightenment movement had ever done such a thing!
If you're hearing the echo of 'real Enlightenment governance has never been tried,' that's not a coincidence.
Only a common knowledge of the historically unprecedented size of the mountains of skulls that Enlightenment-states could reason themselves into would credibly counter-balance a belief that Enlightened people wouldn't create mountains of skulls like those un-Enlightened barbarians. That is the relevance of the WW1 and WW2 common knowledge. It was a forced entry of common knowledge that, yes, civilized enlightened Europeans absolutely would create mountains of skulls. Enlightened despots would make skull piles on par with or greater than the un-enlightened savages of history, and use Enlightenment themes and principles to lead the publics to slaughter.
But that common knowledge was impossible in the late 1700s when the Americans were forming a state. Because the downsides of the enlightenment, first demonstrated at scale in the French Revolution, hadn't occurred yet.
It would be common knowledge now, however. Which is why @FCfromSSC says
More or less. More precisely, it should not and probably cannot be repeated, and its problems were identified early on. The ideological amalgamation of the American Revolution was a one-shot thing; it worked as well as it did the first time around due to ignorance in the form of an absence of specific elements of common knowledge. Now that those specific elements of common knowledge exist, large portions of the project no longer work and cannot be made to work again.
The common knowledge is how the Enlightenment can go off the rails. Had that been known at the time, the American experiment would have proceeded differently on the basis of that (impossible) knowledge.
You have reasons to oppose Enlightenment rationalism which are independent from any objective measure of famine prevalence, relative likelihood of starting massive wars and killing civilians, etc., and you’re pointing at the failures and shortcomings of certain ostensibly Enlightenment-derived regimes without actually proving that said regimes did worse on those metrics than the ones which came before them.
The Enlightenment regimes don't have to be worse. Equivalence can be just as damning. Equivalence brings into question the value of adopting an explicitly enlightenment model/approach to government as an unproven experiment. The point of the experiment is to lead to different, not equivalent, results / acts of despotism.
If pre-Constitution common knowledge had included things like 'the Enlightenment-camp can rationalize class-based persecution as a necessity and morally justified means of social reform,' the merchant-class that was heavily involved in American government formation would probably not have agreed to as much Enlightenment influence at their own potential expense.
WWI and WWII were utter catastrophes, of course, but their high levels of devastation were largely a result of technological developments, not the fact that they were wars prosecuted by rationalist regimes. (Imperial Japan, for example, was nothing like a rationalist Enlightened state.) Communism killed a lot of people, yes, but it’s not the rationalist or “top-down” elements which are primarily responsible for this result.
These may have been the dark side derivatives of the enlightenment, but there are pretty direct arguments for how each and every one of these historical arguments can tie into various themes and expectations of enlightenment thinkers. It may be in 'that's not what we meant / wanted' forms, but that's a matter of uncontrolled / unpredicted ideological evolution, not a dispute of descent.
The uncontrolled / unintended / unpredicted failure-mode evolutions of the Enlightenment are what are common knowledge today, but not in the past.
Dean
Flairless
6mo ago
Can you explain what the Hobbesian premise is that's being rejected/forgotten?
Sure. You not mentioning Hobbes at all, let alone Hlynka's position on Hobbes, is the Hobbesian premise that is being rejected / forgotten.
How I would characterize Hobbes doesn't matter. My position is that you can't properly characterize Hlynka's position if you don't address such a significant part of the position. Which is rather hard to do without mentioning them, which is generally a precondition to accurately characterizing. If you aren't accurately characterizing Hlynka's arguments, there's reason to doubt the validity of your argument.
The lack of mention in your rebuttal-argument is itself the hole.
Dean
Flairless
6mo ago
What do you think the missing "common knowledge" in question is?
The various mountains of skulls and famines in the name of technocratic progress and rationality.
At its most common denominator, the Enlightenment presumed that good thinking would lead to good results. The Hlynka-claimed divide is that this different upon whether changes mattered most from internal changes or external environmental changes, but they both shared a belief that if you thought through things better, progress would deliver better results as a matter of course, both in a moral and a practical sense.
WW1 was a major culture shock to this mentality, and discredited democracy-enlightenment-rationalists enough that 20th century totalitarianism became an intellectually viable alternative, precisely because the enlightened European states and cultures did incredibly stupid, senseless, and wasteful things to their own delegitimization... twice. And after WW2, the technocratic elements of the Enlightenment that took power in the form of the communist-socialists social engineers proceeded to build mountains of skulls and engineer famines as a result of, disputably, well-meant social reforms. On the other hand, the more individualist-leaning enlightenment descendants of the West otherwise discredited themselves in various Cold War abuses, ranging from the Imperial Presidency of the Americans, the imperial/post-imperial conflicts for influence over the third world, and so on. Plus, you know, that whole MAD thing of deliberate and purposeful preparation to destroy the world.
Had the American founding fathers had the 20th century as common knowledge of how badly enlightenment value evolution could mesh with state powers, it probably would have triggered some substantial shifts in not only the revolution, but the post-revolution American consolidation.
It is simply another expression of rejecting alternative but existing and relevant frameworks of analysis as invalid basis of discussing politics.
There was indeed some (a lot of) garbling. I posted before giving it the reread it needed, and made changes.
All the more reason he should be brought back to defend himself!
And yet, he isn't, which you knew when you began to lambast it. I maintain it was in poor taste, as well as inaccurate.
But it did seem to be one of his most critical recurring positions, it's the position that I've encountered most frequently in other conversations with posters here who claim to be carrying his mantle, and, crucially, it's the position that was outlined in the post I quoted from hydroacetylene. So that's what I wanted to respond to in my post. My post was only intended to respond to that position and not any of Hlynka's other positions.
This would be part of the fundamental flaw in your critique, and further bolstering the validity of Hlynka's critique. Hlynka's positions were relatively closely interconnected, much as the various influences of the Enlightenment were interconnected, and attempting to take and argue over one element in isolation of the underlying substructure leaves a substantial hole in the discourse.
The more you talk around the premise of the hole or substructure argument, the more relevant that premises becomes. An argument of substructure doesn't get disproven by surface-level variances when the substructure argument already predicts and allows for surface-level variations.
But this isn't actually a good way of dividing up different ideologies. It's essentially a non sequitur. It's just something Hlynka latched onto because it seemed like a good way of putting all his enemies onto one side, while he got to stay on the other side.
You are continuing to demonstrate the point of Hobbes-shaped hole in political discourse. The hole exists because the avoiders of the hole reject the underlying premise even when they are aware of it, if they are aware of it in the first place. It is simply another expression of rejecting alternative but existing and relevant frameworks of analysis as an invalid basis of discussing/analyzing politics.
It really doesn't matter if you feel that underlying framework analysis is a bad way of dividing up different ideologies, any more than the narcissism of small differences discredits outside analysis noting relative commonalities. A characterization of you does not need your consent to be accurate or insightful. The same also applies to groups at scale. The premise that it does- that self-identification of most relevant attributes is what matters most- is simply another element of the common-cluster.
It is also a part of the cluster that creates the hole in social understanding when it fails to acknowledge / recognize the relevance of the hole-clusters, or their basis of analysis.
Put another way- you are demonstrating an analytic failure mode equivalent to those who criticized islamic extremists like ISIS of not knowing their own religion and being irrational. This was quite often false. ISIS did have an Islamic cluster-structure which informed their world view. It may have been different from what observerses believed an Islamic cluster-structure should be, but it was quite real, and quite relevant. It was real and relevant regardless of how little someone from another perspective disagreed or dismissed it, because enough people did share in the cluster that ISIS was able to be a major threat rather than an irrelevant marginal movement.
Hlynka's point on the hole in Enlightenment discourse is that various modern political elements that can be traced back to / self-identify with Enlightenment discourse have a similar cluster dismissal / divide. They do not recognize / acknowledge that their cluster-commonalities are not actually the scope of Enlightenment clusters. In turn, they make assumptions that divisions within their subcluster are major divisions in Enlightenment premise, rather than subdivisions of a sub-section.
It also just misrepresents the basic facts about what different groups believe, particularly in the DR. As HBD advocates, they believe in a relatively static human nature that cannot be reshaped by social institutions. Nor can their position be reduced to "white people inherently good, everyone else inherently bad"; they acknowledge that whites have a higher genetic disposition to violent crime than East Asians, for example, and that this would persist regardless of social arrangements.
You are continuing to conflate what Hlynka's regular arguments on the commonality between groups was. It was not an argument of shared surface-level beliefs and conclusions. It was an argument of shared underlying paradigm-assumptions, the common clusters, that undergird and shape the political discourse that reach diverging surface-level beliefs and conclusions but share underlying logic.
There appears to have been a mild resurgence of Hlynkaism on the forum. This is concerning, because I believe that the core tenets of Hlynkaism are deeply confused.
Is there any particularly reason that your belief of the core tenets of Hlynkaism accurately reflect the core tenets of Hlynkaism?
I'm not exactly a fan of top-level posting denouncing the beliefs of someone who isn't permitted to clarify their position, but this is specifically an accuracy question. Hlynka wasn't exactly adverse to elaborating his position at length, even going so far as to do so in multiple top-level posts in his Inferential Distance series, and you've linked to none of them to allow a cross-reference of your claim of the position and the position as provided by the man whose views you raise to denounce.
Which itself wouldn't be a failure by any means if you accurately characterized his position. But Hlynka's narrative had some pretty clear and specific keywords that you've not even raised. Some of Hlynka's tropes included raising the divided nature of the Enlightenment, early Enlightenment thinkers such as Hobbes, the concept of the loci of control and agency against different paradigms, and so on. These are relatively distinct keywords of Hlynkaism, the sort that are easy to CTRL-F to search for to see if one is even referencing related texts. You are not, which is indicative that you are not speaking from the same sheet, or even referring to the same base of reference, as the Hlynkaists.
Which, itself, is emblematic of one of Hlynka's major claims- that there is a major hole in the discourse of current politics from a spectrum of Enlightenment-derived groups that do not acknowledge / recognize / are unaware of the relevance and salience of certain major Enlightenment influences, i.e. the Hobbes-and-Burke shaped hole that he regularly referred to.
This was central Hlynka's reoccurring thesis because Hlynka claimed that this was a commonality amongst people who internalized the other spectrum/side of the enlightenment, a group which rejected the Hobbes-and-Burke premise. Call it whatever you want- left or right, whether humans are naturally good or evil, the nature of the locus of control as internal (individualist/person-centric) or external (you can change people and the world by taking and changing the institutions), but this was a cluster of concepts that served as a dividing premise in Hlynkaism.
These Englightenment-traced premise clusters were the grounds of what Hlynka viewed as bringing people who nominally despised each other on 'fundamental' or 'tactical' differences into an animosity of close-differences. The paradigm of comparison was the cluster of enlightenment principles they derived from. The adoption of those sorts of clusters vis-a-vis the Hobbes-and-Burke shaped hole that wasn't even considered a meaningful alternative was the grounds of claiming commonality. You raising reformation and revolutionary marxists tactical differences is demonstrating a fundamental confusion of the paradigm in question. Hlynkaism is far more interested in their enlightenment cluster paradigms they share (class-based analysis of society, external loci of control prioritizing institutional control) than the tactics.
This may be wrong by some internal contradiction, it may not be a correct reading of history, but an effective counter-argument to the a central tenet that there is a Hobbes-and-Burke hole in the discourse should probably not avoid mentioning Hobbes and Burke entirely. Nor is it countered by rejecting Hlynka's structure and imposing your own that rejects the former's categorical premise. That sort of rejection / non-recognition of the alternative enlightenment paradigms was / is one of the core tenets of Hlynkaism.
A critique of Hlynkaism that doesn't even mention the "Enlightenment" or "hole" even once is probably not a critique of Hlynkaism's core tenets. It may, however, lend credence to some of his arguments on the relevance of not recognizing or addressing very significant background contexts.
Dean
Flairless
6mo ago
Summer Wars, a 2009 movie, is an interesting short-ish experience. It was sort of a... not spiritual sequel, but a 'this is the story we wanted to tell' of one of the digimon movies. Basically an internet-of-things-meets-rogue-AI experience. A nice family story that also balances tradition and progress in a family story context. Only a few hours long.
I sincerely do think the third digimon series in particular, Digimon Tamers, is a well put together series and not-exactly-accidental AI allegory. On top of a bildungsroman for the children, it basically is an 'alignment and conflict between humans and AI' narrative. Once you accept that the digital monsters are AI, you can recognize AI metaphors that would be more coherent decades later, upto and including the limits of government capacity to keep control. This includes an AI developer not recognizing the implications of his invention and having to grow with it as much as guide it (kid makes magical monster who is fundamentally childlike), various AI-growth-risk metaphors, and even rogue AI.
Ghost in the Shell is an older and more adult-focused classic. It's far more in the cyberpunk field of things, but it's a gem for reasons, though reasons include some pretty abstract stuff.
I find this whole conversation and the intensity of your passion bizarre, but okay.
And I find your attempts to play coy in Kulak's defense silly.
There is no schrodenger's anarchist. Either Kulak can be credited with living up to his standard, or he is not credited.
Setting aside the indisputable fact that you have no idea whether he 'conducted' 'positive action',
I have multiple reasons to believe he did not, including but not limited to previous admissions of absence and his testy defense of absence on grounds of surgery. He deleted that reddit post soon after, but the surrounding claim of surgery is echoed by others including yourself.
it remains the case that even you don't claim he's ever said that someone should intentionally broadcast the matter afterward.
I have, however, claimed that people do not get to claim credit for actions neither they nor anyone else claim they have been a part of.
That would obviously be crazy.
Bravery often is. However, Kulak's call to action was not to be something other than crazy, but to not be a coward. Note the different goalposts. Being non-crazy is perfectly consistent with being a coward.
You know what would also be crazy, though? Being a substacker who makes calls to violence on associated social media accounts while secretly moonlighting as an actual anarchist engaging in political violence. Clearly Kulak is not above being crazy at least some of the time. We are merely in dispute as to how much and when.
After reading your post multiple times it's still not clear to me what inconsistency you're trying to catch him in. What is clear to me is that there's some kind of unseemly antipathy here. At any rate I'm checking out of the conversation and will not be responding further.
I am moved by your attempt to leave with the last word and a final zing, and your confessed confusion on the position that Kulak is a consistent coward by his own standard.
By way of reply, if I knew the answer, and that answer were yes, do you think I'd talk about it?
By way of reply, does your willingness to acknowledge whether someone else is a coward or not change any factor of them being a coward?
In his old reddit posts on the trucker protests, Kulak made cowardness conditional on whether one conducted political violence regardless of being caught and identified. This was a demand for a positive action, and failure to meet that action was a categorical proof of personal failure deserving social contempt. He established no exceptions- inaction itself was proof of failure.
Kulak has also made no claim of having conducted political violence at the time he claimed it was necessary to prove one was not a coward. Nor have any of his sympathizers. In fact, sympathizers have provided claims that he did not meet the non-coward criteria for reasons that did not meet his pre-established exceptions. Further, no claim of compensatory action has been claimed- nothing that might provide absolution for the initial failure if her were physically incapable of prioritizing getting into a protest over his personal health. Which itself is a claim no one has made, least of all his defenders.
The principle of positive claims requiring positive evidence to warrant belief does not get reversed for reasons of OPSEC by people who dismissed fear of discovery or arrest as grounds for non-involvement. 'Oh, Kulak can't admit to conducting political violence- he'd be caught!' is not a basis to believe Kulak lived up to his claimed requirements for not being a coward. Kulak would not admit to have conducting political violence if he had not met the standard. The absence of the claim is not proof of a claim.
None of this would seem to have any relation to whether you would admit to any knowledge or lack of knowledge.
Kulak can be accused of many things but I haven't yet caught him in moral inconsistency.
Kulak being a moral coward would be morally consistent. It might be morally contemptable, but it would be consistent.
Kulak can be condemned on plenty of grounds. As a historian, a literary analyst, even a rhetorician. However, the condemnation of cowardness can be justified by his own standard presented that he presented as a demand for action lest one be dismissed as a coward.
He did not act. Hence, he can be dismissed as a coward. That he makes no claim to having acted in other cases are additional, but redundant, cases for being a consistent coward.
Dean
Flairless
6mo ago
Early 2000s anime had some interesting takes on internet implications. It's something of a time capsule- plenty of acknowledgement of danger / risk / threat (viruses as monsters, etc.), but also mystery / ambiguous potential.
Sword Art really ruined the genre by turning it pure isekai MMO power fantasy.
That's who I'm blaming, anyway.
Why is that fair to him? He set the standard he judged others by, and he can be judged by it in turn. 'Fair' is not 'nice,' it is impartiality.
Did he meet his own standard of sincerity and moral courage that he accused other of lacking if they did not join a violent resistance despite risk of bodily harm as a consequence?
Or did he abstain on grounds of the consequence of bodily harm?
When someone makes moral judgements and accusations of cowardness for others not risking life or limb, the fair response to claims of personal abstainment on grounds of risk of limb if they went forth is not 'oh, you could get hurt? That's understandable.' It is 'so what, coward?'
Particularly since there have many been many other contexts, before and after, for him to have proven his bravery, if he wanted to tie bravery to political defiance and violence.
Your confusion is probably because you are strawmanning an argument I did not make, while conflating different lines of argument, while trying to cite an article as evidence I should reconsider my position even though the article consists of insinuating a charge that the text acknowledges has not happened.
Which is to say, it cries wolf.
I am sure if you continue to push more information of Donald Trump not deporting american citizens without due process you will continue to accomplish more cries of wolf.
Dean
Flairless
6mo ago
My response to the 'missing the old system' is 'the grass on the other side is always greener.' That substack has its own authorial restraints doesn't mean it doesn't successfully establish independence from traditional media constraints. It just means that it's a change of constraints, rather than an absence of constraints.
Which, frankly, is not going to change. In the same way that the abolishment of private markets under communism didn't mean that people didn't have to work for a living, there is always going to be a tension between 'what the writer wants to do' and 'what the paymaster is willing to pay for.' And as long as there is a need to justify receiving limited resources- and there will always be limited resources- there will always be a paymaster in some form.
That doesn't mean that it isn't a net gain. The fact that Tracingwoodgrains and Kulak are equally eligible to make a living giving their opinions is still better than a world where only one or even none of them could because established opinion-generators ran the system like a cartel.
As they say, anything that you do for a living rather than passion, you'll eventually end up economizing to minimize costs- including time and effort- relative to expected income.
When people make their opinions the basis of their livelihood, their future intellectual freedom is shaped by the nature of their payment structure. If you draw a salary, you're not exactly going to be criticizing the hand that feeds you for long. If you make commissions, you're going to optimize for iterations to earn more commissions.
But when you go substack-style subscriber model, you're going to be pressured to keep providing people what they pay money for. The information you have is that they paid money for [x], and your brand grew from your reputation, and thus recommendations, for saying [x]. And if you don't, the subscribers go away. You live or starve by your brand.
In some respects this is more ideological constraining than a salary structure, since a salary-payer may have special interest in your input if you change an opinion. If you live on [organization Y]'s salary-dole, and you raise issue that [organization Y] may not like, that could be really valuable to know. Your reputation for supporting X makes warnings against X all the more credible. It's like if the Catholic Church criticizes papal conduct. If your job is providing advice / recommendations, this is the most important sort of advice you're liable to offer, and thus justify continue paying for. (Up to a point- if you get a reputation to anti-X instead, it may turn differently.)
In a subscriber model, however, going against the audience grain is a recipe for losing buy-in, but without gaining equivalent opposite payments. At which point, a variation of 'the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent' kicks in. Your audience base can remain unhappy and unwilling to fund you longer than you can get by without an audience base, and you can go under sooner than it takes to build a new audience base.
At which point, your incentive structure is that if you want a comfortable existence, don't fail to deliver what keeps you in a comfortable existence.
Can I convince you to try old children's cartoon series, like the original Digimon Adventure anime?
Digimon was a 1999 children's monster anime from Japan centered around a group of children who meet at a summer camp and find themselves in another world. There they are met by monsters both friendly and not as they try to survive and understand the new world they find themselves in, even as their goal is to find their way back home and return to their families. The story follows the children's efforts to survive, which depends on their personal growth, their relationships with each other, and their partnership with the monster-partners who met them on arrival claiming to have been waiting for them from the start. The later is part of the mystery of the plot that unfolds over 54 episodes, each less than half and hour.
This was isekai before isekai became a power fantasy cliche, more Swiss Family Robinson than Sword Art Online. While the format of the show is a literal monster-of-the-week setup, at nearly every stage of the adventure the children are the underdogs running from a far, far more powerful adversary. Rather than an escapist fantasy from Japanese life, it is fundamentally a story of lost-and-seeking-to-return to home and family.
While the production quality is terribly dated by modern standards- late-90s era animation, pre-modern adaptation practices, etc.- it also had strong character writing. 'Came for the monsters, stayed for the children' is how I fondly remember it. Now, that is on the admittedly biased recollections of a children's show from literal decades ago, but japanese anime has (had?) that trait of sometimes smuggling better writing into anime than American children's media of the time.
(There are various sequel series- some direct sequels, some in other settings. The third series, Digimon Tamers, starts as more of an urban fantasy genre, but arguably is better polished due to a smaller character caste and thus more focus on individual character arcs over time.)
What makes me think this might be appropriate to your ask is that the series (or at least the earlier iterations) is that the series is fundamentally a bildungsroman- a narrative focusing on the protagonists' formative years and spiritual education.
The series is fundamentally a collection of character development stories, in which the monsters and the adventure are the framing device for the children to grow, with that maturation being the narrative payoff as much as the ultimate outcome of the adventure. This isn't a mere 'the power of friendship means we win' spiel either- the series takes an Aristotelian approach to character traits, in which a virtue can become a flaw both by its absence and its excess. And this struggle is the basis of character arcs that track the entire series, even as this process is central to the world-building system.
So I thought of this when I read your criteria.
By line...
I am looking for story where group of characters (family or friends) form together a group that is NOT dysfunctional.
I think this qualifies. The groups that form have internal conflicts, but they are conflicts that are worked through. When there is an enduring conflict, it is character-appropriate and often plot-significant.
As a bildungsroman, the story is characters forming into better people. This does mean they start as worse people, but this is generally in terms of 'good-faith kids who are out of their depth and not yet mature' rather than malicious / incompetent / immoral. There is a generally consistent sense of progression, as the character development of the episode is generally permanent going forward rather than something forgotten in the next episodes.
Them dealing with problematic/oppressive/bureaucratic/evil world is fine, in fact I want to have some conflict. On the other hand I do not want them to win effortlessly or get some insanely OP powers that invalidate any opposition. I do not want tragic/bad ending, I also do not want obvious 100% perfect absurd success thanks to blatant plot armor.
Digimon Adventure starts as a survival story in which the world is dangerous, but with heavy distinctions between evil, morally flawed, and dangerous. Most of the series entails the children on the run or otherwise hiding from the Big Bad.
I also want story to not feature blatantly stupid setting or characters that make no sense whatsoever. Initially I phrased it as "no unrealistic stuff" but I am in fact fine with dragon-flying slave traders as antagonists, as long as suspension of disbelief is achievable.
The series is an isekai. The nature of the isekai isn't exactly a meta-mystery (digimon = digital monsters), but is one to the character cast.
If you can adopt the lie of the isekai premise, it is consistent enough in that context. It reflects a now-archaic 'the internet as a wild new frontier, both dangerous and amazing' mentality rather than any current political concept like disinformation or some such.
I strongly prefer avoidance of current politics in either direction, I have seen remarkably few cases where it was done well. I also do not want books that would be recommended only due to current politics, quality of that is even worse.
The series is a Japanese series that predates the post-2000 culture war. It also predates the Japanese moe-phase or isekai-escapist trends of the late 2000s/2010s.
Story may be small scale.
As an episodic series, there are many smaller-scale stories within the larger plot. While there is a constant the-stakes-are-survival context from the start, many individual stories are fundamentally smaller-stakes, like imposter syndrome, overcoming personal failures and guilt, or familial challenges born of love and complication. There is even a story about trying to help a friend who is being scammed and feeling like you are being dragged down with them.
The series does grow in scale and stakes as the internal mysteries are developed, but they fundamentally start at much, much lower scale in their initial premise. The first series starts with a survive-and-return-home premise, and keeps that for most of the series.
(The urban-fantasy series 3 starts as 'how do I keep my baby dinosaur a secret and out of trouble' child's-secret-pet tale, before the real adventure is about trying to find a lost friend. Again, everything else is framing for small-at-heart struggles.)
...so, have I gotten you to consider watching a 25-year-old children's cartoon with terrible-by-modern-standards production levels for your serious fiction fix?
Well, Hlynka was a self-admitted Warhammer 40k player. The Trump-as-God-Emperor meme was directly from 40k-aware communities. Furthermore, iirc Hlynka was an orks player, which is to say low-class social barbarian faction.
Ergo...
[/sarcasm]
Dean
Flairless
6mo ago
Kulak is LARPing an imagined history, not reading the historical texts that he actually refers to. The ancients were extremely conscious of the perils of violence, and, though not always uncomplicatedly, prized mercy and reconciliation as well.
Kulak has made LARPing a revolutionary his financial income. Back in the Canadian trucker protests he made repeated calls to resistance and violence and called it a moral failing for any man not to risk death or hospitalization for the righteous cause... while begging exception since he was already in a hospital for a medical procedure. Gotta look out for you own health first, right?
Alas, any cause that warrants risking hospitalization to prove virtue is worth leaving a hospital that you might be returned to.
Kulak is a modern day version of the man with their rocking chair by the fire who valorizes the virtue of fighting and glory of dying young to defend hearth and home.
Stronger thanks to your expectation that that a story in which Trump is not dispensing of due process should provide a bayesian update that Trump is dispensing of due process.
Particularly given the form of delivery is the common TDS failure mode on the taking Trump seriously versus literally divide, which has been an archetypical form of crying wolf about Trump intents for a decade.
Taxonomical Ranking of Ideologies... I like that metaphor. Thank ye.
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