JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
OK, I am interested - so what law enforcement, DHS, Tom Corbett, etc. did there actually? I mean, for me the conjugation of "DHS" and "stopping hate" immediately invokes the abortive "disinformation panel" as an attempt of the Government to route around the First Amendment somehow and get rid of the annoying necessity to ask Facebook/Twitter to censor for them "voluntarily" and demand the same directly and without question. An offer nobody could refuse. I mean, not that Big Tech would ever refuse to censor people they don't like, and it so happens the people who control the government and the people who control the Big Tech dislike the same people, so we have perfect harmony - but still, the control is in the wrong place. That's how I see this combination. But I am ready to keep an open mind and let myself be surprised.
So I didn't spend much time on it, but I went to look at the agenda. Looks like I need to correct my prior almost-zero-information impression about it and add some details.
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The Military and Veterans are major source of Hate. If fact, they are the only segment of society that has a separate track concentrating on how to deal with Extremists among them. It's actually Track 1.
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Far-right is full of Hate and Extremism. Far-left does not exist at all. I did find one single panel that suggests left-wing extremism exists, though nobody cares to study it, but no mention of it beyond that.
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Antifa does exist, but only as a target for hate from the Far Right, because for some of them for reasons beyond comprehension, think anti-fascists are their enemies.
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Anti-semitism exists, but the sources of it are on the Right only.
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There's no hate at all directed towards white males (yay!) unless they're Jews of course (dang...)
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January 6 demonstrators are roughly the same thing as Nazis. At least considering them together in one bucket is entirely appropriate.
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Islam does not exist. Islamic State did, but it's all in the past and they didn't do anything of interest to anybody there. Wait, no, Muslims do exist - as targets of hate from the right.
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The reaction to violent extremism should include increased censorship and suppression of speech on the governmental (or inter-governmental) level. This includes suppressing "misinformation", as it is a major driver of extremism.
Of course, this is from the agenda description only, but I think I'm not wildly off base here.
So yes, I think I was wrong in my initial assessment. This is not a gathering of people who want to feel offended. This is a gathering of people who want to suppress and eradicate "haters", "extremists" and "domestic terrorists", by which they will primarily designate their political opponents, and these political opponents will be mainly residing on the right. The terms "hate" and "right" aren't really as much equated as "hate" is presumed to be almost fully contained and encapsulated by the "right".
Now I wish my original assessment were true. It was so much more comfortable.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
Congratulations, you invented the "developed socialism". That's what it was called in the USSR. And they actually tried to build the AI that would make the planned socialist economy work. A lot of very smart people worked on it, intellectual powerhouses like Kantorovich (who, interestingly, got his Nobel in Economics right between Hayek and Friedman) - but of course it didn't work. Not because they didn't have computers fast enough and AI algorithms clever enough - but because such system has so many internal contradictions and misaligned incentives that it can't work.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
Why would AGI need the souls? I mean, unless the brain contains some stuff beyond currently known physics, there are probably more efficient ways to build computational platforms. And AGI could easily trick humans into delivering any necessary help...
In the real world you're just eating cricket dust.
All described by the genius of Stanislaw Lem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Futurological_Congress
only there the platform is drugs, not chips
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
Basically 2nd said it's OK for the government to condition prosecution on "correct" partisan-based behavior - i.e. "either you close accounts of all Republicans or we are going to audit your bank until the angels sound their trumpets and hound your mercilessly for every tiny paperwork violation like you're Al Capone". I can't really find words beyond "welcome to the Banana Republic of America" to react to this.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
Glad to hear that people there manage to have more sane politics than in the US, at least in that aspect of it.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
The "irredeemable criminal" hypothesis may be interesting to discuss, but "drug dealers" are very, very bad example for that category. Most of low-level dealers aren't different from grocery store clerks - they just find whatever work they can get that pays their wages. Yes, the stuff they sell is illegal, but so what? It's just circular logic - it's bad because it's illegal, and illegal because it's bad. They are certainly not "impossible to reform" - in fact, for most of them there's not much to reform, if they had any other hustle that as available and profitable as this, but safer, they'd switch in a minute and never look back. They're certainly not "lifelong criminals" you're looking for, even though in fact they could very well spend the life on the wrong side of the law. They don't do it because of love of violence, they do it because it's the easy way - or at least one that looks easy.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
Many substances can cause addiction and death. They are arbitrarily classified into categories, without any regard to their actual danger (marijuana/THC/CBD is considered more dangerous than barbiturates, alcohol and nicotine, for example) and "societal danger" is assigned on the basis of that arbitrary classification, which is subsequently erased from consideration by using umbrella term "drugs" to cover the whole spectrum as if it were all the same and contained category.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
Can they articulate why selling marijuana is worse than selling vodka?
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
increased costs such as healthcare of dealing with people who take too many drugs
That'd be a valid argument if those people didn't do exactly the same right now. It's not like it's completely impossible to get drugs - any major city, like San Francisco, has open and well-known drug markets operating, and the authorities pretty much has long ago given up on doing something about it. They still can arbitrarily arrest people for it, but nobody is under an illusion that anything will make any dent into the availability of any drugs.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
IIRC I saw mentions of free-data deals with Netflix, etc. on certain mobile providers, though I'm not sure they still exists. OTOH, I think California enacted its own NN in 2018, so a lot of Big Tech are still covered by it, I think?
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
ISPs aren't very eager to censor right now. The front-end platforms are censoring like crazy, the second-tier platforms - like Cloudflare, DNS providers, cloud providers, etc. - are censoring reluctantly and only when the Lefist activists are particularly inflamed (I don't think anything on the Left has ever been censored by second-tier) and low-level ISPs as far as I know don't do political censorship at all, so far. Of course, this could change very quickly - but as of now, I don't see ISP censorship being something that's on the agenda.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
cyperpunk libertarians out there that support Net Neutrality on a purely dogmatic basis
No libertarian can support NN on a purely dogmatic basis - since it's a governmental intrusion into private business and restriction of freedom of association and contract. Of course, some libertarians may still support it, arguing that this is a minimal intrusion that achieves a lot of good outcomes and prevents outcomes that would be less desirable - but that would be pragmatic and not dogmatic basis. Dogmatic basis is that government intrusion can only happen to protect natural rights and enforce contracts. I do not see any natural rights arguments that demand NN, thus on purely dogmatic libertarian basis, NN is treif.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
Am I crazy for thinking her first paragraph is negated by the second?
No, and as soon as you saw the word "diverse", you can predict the rest. The DIE religion credo is very formulaic and well-rehearsed, and you'll see it anywhere the adepts of this particular sect are encountered. It's like "Proletariat of the world, unite!" of DIE. And of course, it does not imply any actual equality (equality is a racist concept anyway) or inclusion for everybody. It implies a hierarchy of oppression (and thus of value, since value is directly proportional to being oppressed) - in which, unfortunately for them, white straight people occupy one of the lowest levels. Well, when you have an hierarchy, somebody has to be at the bottom, right? That's who. Sorry, better luck next time being born.
Taking all this at face value is like reading USSR Communist Party reports in 1980s about how USSR is about to reach communism any day now and comparing it to what happens on the ground. You'd go crazy if you tried to do it genuinely. In fact, you were literally declared crazy (they invented special kind of "schizophrenia" to put dissidents into forced psychiatric care) if you tried to do something like that in public. We're living in much milder environment now - all that'd happen you'd be banned on Twitter and Facebook. But the divergence between religious formula and actual facts is not going anywhere.
I don't understand their motivations.
Can you understand motivations of monks, fasting for years to achieve religious enlightenment? Then you can understand motivations of people who place themselves at the lowest rung of societal ladder (sometimes in pretend to achieve actual power, sometimes genuinely) to atone for the sins of their ancestors. It's not exactly a new recipe. And it doesn't actually cost them that much - at least in what they can see - and makes them feel very righteous.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
In the "community". The idea is to imply they have as much claim on being the members of the "community" as you do, and the fact that you have a home, pay taxes, contribute to maintaining infrastructure, etc. while they do drugs, defecate on the street and turn sidewalks into dumps - is a pure coincidence, and with correct redistribution of resources from you to them it all can be fixed. Usually this claim is advanced by people who hope to do the redistribution of resources.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
One that accepts the public utility infrastructure principle applied to last mile (libertarians here, not anarchists)
There's no such principle in libertarianism. For anarchists, "public" doesn't mean anything at all, since there's no state. For libertarians, "public" means "operated by the government", and the only thing that can be so is the institutions that are dedicated to preserving natural rights (e.g. the police putting murderers in jail) and enforcing contracts (e.g. if you promised to pay your bills, you better pay them or else). I don't see much place for "public utility infrastructure principle" here. Now, you may like the practical benefits of this, whatever it means - but if we're talking about "dogmatic basis", there's just no place for it, and anybody who accepts it may be dogmatic anything, but not a libertarian. Just as somebody who accepts private ownership of means of production is not a communist, even though there are probably much proven benefits to that concept.
left libertarians would favor a common carrier equal service regulation.
They may favor anything they like, but they're not any kind of libertarians then. It doesn't make sense to use the label "libertarian" for somebody that accepts regulation they like and rejects regulation they don't - everybody is "libertarian" like that, the label will provide zero selectivity then.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
A communist still accepts that capitalism exists.
Sure, there's a difference between what communist wants to happen, ideally, and what's existing on the ground now. So a communist may push for higher taxation of private business - but always with the ultimate goal in mind that these businesses should eventually be all nationalized and under the control of Gosplan. So if we talk about tactical flexibility, then yes, that's a thing. But if we're talking about dogmatic position - then I can't call someone who accepts capitalism a dogmatic communist. And I can't see any libertarian support regulation of private business on a purely dogmatic basis. On the tactical grounds, as a political move to improve an imperfect situation and make it less imperfect - sure.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
I haven't listened for many podcasts lately but various new streaming subscription services are equally garbage. Why can't I watch an episode of Star Trek without being interrupted in the middle 8 times for several minutes to listen in the 20th time for the same moronic ad? Not enough that they want me to subscribe to a dozen of different ones, they also insist on shoving ads down my throat to milk my wallet a bit more.
That just makes me to unfold my old Jolly Roger flag that I hoped to retire for good one day, because there's a limit of how much abuse one can take while paying money for it.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
To what end? Putin is not going to abandon his strategy of rebuilding Russian Empire, and he is considering the West as the antagonist which they need to fight. Throwing him a bone won't change it - he'd not suddenly feel warm and accepting towards Western values or concerns, or abandon his plans of territorial expansion. What he'd learn from it, is that the price for the bone is X soldiers dead and Y money spent. As long as he finds this price acceptable - and no amount of soldiers dead has ever been unacceptable in Russia, and due to green policies hydrocarbon prices will likely remain high for a while, giving him enough money - he will continue to reach for the bones. As long as the West guarantees there will be always "saving face" at the end, it's all worth it for him. There's no incentive to not do it again, and again, and again, and again.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
If there was a world where letting Putin keep Crimea etc. would solve the problem, it could be something to discuss. But we're not living in such a world, and we know it for the fact since February 24, because Putin de-facto had all that already. Ukraine had neither capability nor will to retake any of the territories occupied by Russia in 2014, the West was not inclined to support it with anything substantially more than "blankets and helmets", and sanctions on Russia were feeble and inconsequential. Biden himself supported opening North Stream 2, for one!
To seriously consider that if we roll back to pre-Feb 24, and pretend nothing ever happened, that will be a stable situation acceptable to any side and a long term solution - it's just impossible for anybody seriously thinking about the situation.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
A lot of them probably don't work, because what's invested on paper and what actually exists are a very different things in Russia. But it doesn't matter - they're not going to try to win a war here. They just need to make one successful strike anywhere to cause humongous losses to all Western economic system. And both sides know it.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
Looks like the initiative came from the wife, Anna Gabrielian, who was genuinely sympathetic to the Russian cause (there more such people in the US then you think - but then if you read history, in the 1940s there were enough people in the US sympathetic to the Nazi cause) and wanted to do something to help Mother Russia. She got the husband involved, and the trans angle seems to be coincidental to this. This is a weird coincidence, but from what is publicly known about the case, I don't see any play for the trans angle here.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
Not everybody can bag a high-level State Department official. Third-grade spymasters must be doing something too. I imagine that's the kind of people they're dealing with.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
These are trifles. He didn't start the war to open the canal.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
Even if you don't, a cursory knowledge of 20th century history should tell one that it's not how you deal with a nascent Fascist state declaring it's going to restore it's rightful place in the world by taking whatever territory it likes to, and nobody should dare to contradict them because they are The Greatest Nation. Feeding them little pieces of neighboring countries is not a recipe for peace in our time.
True all that, and I wish people would be capable of such nuance as telling apart Fascists and National-Socialists, but mostly it doesn't happen, and mostly parties are coded as "far right" are then commonly referred to as "those Nazis" and are treated exactly as they were literally Hitler. So when this coding is applied, it understandably triggers the reaction, and if serious on-merits discussion is expected, it should be accompanied with appropriate explanation about what "far right" means in this particular case. Yet better is to avoid this term altogether and use more specific and meaningful terms.
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