KulakRevolt
Writes at https://anarchonomicon.substack.com/
Writes weird Twitter Threads @FromKulak
Rides motorcycles... poorly.
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Winner of Motte Post of the Year 2019
User ID: 905
KulakRevolt
2yr ago
This is why the object of Any effective american class war should be to either nationalize the top 100 schools and force them to expand admissions til their brand value is dead, or ultimatum them into expanding or withdraw all federal funding/accreditation
KulakRevolt
2yr ago
You know the French had an interesting solution to nautical NGOs messing with their geostrategic interests...
Ever heard of the Rainbow Warrior?
KulakRevolt
2yr ago
Do people care more about culture warring than survival?
Absolutely and they're absolutely right to do it.
There is one threat historically that will kill you, your friends, your family, and all of your children... and that's your political enemies.
The lesson of the 20th century is well over 250 million people were murdered by their own governments because they didn't hate their political opponents hard enough. They were willing to give their political opponents the benefit of the doubt, they were willing to try and live in a country in which their political opponents held power supreme power rather than resort to violence.
That was a mistake. it was a mistake of the landed farmers in Ukraine and Russia to try to live with the soviets in charge of them instead fighting to the death against their class enemies forming a government, it was a mistake of the Jews to not actually participate in terrorist conspiracies against the German government, and it was a mistake of the educated Chinese to try and live with their poltitical opponents trying to implement a cultural revolution.
No ethnicity has ever died out from having too much hatred and obstinacy in their heart. The occupants of the Stans and the Caucuses have surived thousands of years through mutual paranoia and hatred... Cooperation? Compromise? Working with your fellow man? Trusting that everyone ultimately wants what's best everyone? Not being tempted by extremism or alarmism?
250 million died making those mistakes. over 10% of the 1930 population.
KulakRevolt
2yr ago
I'm not Sloppy Goppy.
sloppy Goppy is a guest poster I host on my substack.
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My Ukraine theory is that the conflict is becoming increasingly unstable and the escalatory equilibrium could break soon, with both Ukraine and Russia attacking vital infrastructure, which would end with Ukraine as a failed sate, and the entire region destabilized.
KulakRevolt
2yr ago
Dude we wondering if you were a bot because you were quoting from an article 3 weeks earlier by a different author as if it was the the piece presented, didn't realize it was unrelated to the piece you were commenting on, and didn't even realize the previous author agreed with your take. and was presenting the quote to argue against it...
Honestly this reply is so detached from the actual state of the conversation I'm leaning back towards bot
KulakRevolt
2yr ago
Twitter got big in 2012-2015 when violent revolutions were being organized, literal beheading videos were bieng shared, and ISIS recruitment was the norm on the platform.
People want unmoderated content. They want to see how fucked-up other people are, they want to point a gawk.
4chan is somehow still one of the more relevant online spaces depite having and awful interface that has barely improved since 2005, and now requires nigh unusable captchas to post anything at all (since they're always under bot attack)
Any its still used by 100s of thousands of daily users.
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Twitter has consistently destroyed its own market power the past few years in the name of appeasing the US security state. They restricted COVID misinfo right when something like twitter might have caused an armed anti-lockdown insurrection in the US (Twitter mobs have destroyed nations over vastly less), and they booted trump at the exact moment he could have issued a tweet that would have brought down the republic.
Imagine if Jan 6th he had tweeted support for the stormers and told his 60 million supporters to start a revolution?
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Twitter's power is its a place where unapproved ideas, extremism, and yes, even lies, can move fast enough that history itself is torn assunder. Its a place you have to be if you want to follow the news or accumulate power... because it is the modern battlefield. And that's worth vastly more than 45billion to own.
And they were willing to give that up and be just a second teir social networking platform... when the FBI and DHS hasn't even taken them to court?
Jack Dorsey's old line that he wanted twitter to be "The free-speech wing of the free-speech party" wasn't just an aspiration... its what's gave twitter its importance and success.
Twitter is the only social media platform that can measure its impact both in users, and in nations destroyed.
That's power! That's impact! That's growth industry! That's the future! (if indeed we are ever to enter the future instead of decay into a parody of the 20th century)
By buying twitter and taking it private where equity firms can't force it to follow ESG or bend over to "anti-extremism" pressure Musk has gotten closer to actually being one of the Cyberpunk CEO-Warlords like Weyland, Tyrell, or Arasaka.
In 2024 he'll be in position to decide what Arab Spring style story he wants to rock the American empire.
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He flies who flies
This king flies away from you
Ye mortals
He is not of the earth
He is of the sky
He flaps his wings like a zeret bird
He goes to the sky
He goes to the sky
On the wind
On the wind
KulakRevolt
2yr ago
Ugh... is no one else going to comment on the fact that the film's trailer was explicitly, openly, character who's a screenwriter insert monologuingly, hostile to the idea of appealing to a straight audience?
Seriously just watch it https://youtube.com/watch?v=SiJoqTk08AI
When your trailer is a monologue about how you're not going to try to appeal to straight audiences... well it seems very weird to complain they didn't show up
KulakRevolt
2yr ago
Well it missed that audience as well... straight women want the gay experience catered to their tastes, they want a nicholas sparks novel or rom-com where they get to drool over both leads, and it feels slightly taboo. Brokeback Mountain hit this audience perfectly.
They don't want a movie named after a frat term of endeerment and that conotes jock humour... There is stuff like that but that's usually compromise fair like American Pie, Neighbors, etc. that Exists to straddle the line of mixed company where several straight friends might be together and female tastes won't dominate.
They alienated the female audience with "Bros" and male audiences with "Gay"
KulakRevolt
2yr ago
I'm not sure how much you can draw from that... Given how integrated Jews are and how much a minority they are in absolute terms (1.8%), a 39% intra-racial preference would represent an EXTREME ingroup preference over what we'd expect if they just considered themselves interchangeably white.
Like do you think American's of German Descent would in-marry at 39% in a random segment of America where they're 1.8% of the population? or do you think it'd very quickly approach the random rate of 1.8%?
KulakRevolt
2yr ago
Making incresingly precise tools almost always requires making obscenely large tools to produce them.
look into what's required to make microchips you need high precision blast furnaces to superheat the silicon, you need specialized hyperstable equipment to withdraw the silicon in even wafers, etc. etc... and all that equipment needs a stable of specialized precision equipment to produce it.. .etc.
To get even more micro in terms of final product you almost certainly need a vastly more complex supply chain...
Now in fiction we assume that once the machines themselves get so small and precise the process will reverse and now those tiny machines will be able to produce other machines... but its really not obvious that that's going to be the case, or certainly not obvious that that would be the case without the equivalent of several centuries more of advancement.
Its very likely that any AI would be stuck at vastly cruder levels of development up until it had the equivalent of a global economy's amount of resources to play with...
KulakRevolt
2yr ago
No.
If bot activity is widespread it starts showing telltale signs really fast, and then kills discussion. This is why Twitter conversations never really go anymore than 1 reply deep now, if you try you get burned really fast.
On twitter, if you say something about a key issue and a bot brigades you they run through a series of replies copied right of some UR post they mined... you only notice when you ask them if they're a bot and ask them to reply with the color of mint, only for them to reply to that challenge with yet more text copy pasted from some article that supports whatever position they're shilling.
"...and that's why the donbass is essentially Ukrainian"
"Wait that didn't engage with anything I said. are you a bot? What colour is the sky?"
"When you look Crimea however there's..."
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I've never seen anything like that here,... where entire bot reply chains happen to create the illusion of 50/50 or greater support for one issue... and after you notice and start calling it, they keep going and following the script... so maybe I'm talking out of my ass and blowing a few bad/non-sequiter comments out of proportion...
But its the kind-of thing that you don't forget if it happens to you and it paranoia poisons all your future interactions.
Its possible in my experience here one person schizo'd out, and another didn't read the ariticle and took their detached out of context quotations as representative... but it something I've grown paranoid about and wanted to gauge everyone else's sense of the vibe
KulakRevolt
2yr ago
Nah most of these comments wouldn't require anything so complex.
Just a simple format...
quote->Affirmation/disagreement->[Content to be pushed]
quote->Contextual content taking from past comments that are matched based on word choice->[content to be pushed/no content if disruption, etc. is the goal
There are tons of easy hacks to get people to engage/think they're interacting with something real that requires no dynamic intelligence at all.
Telemarketers regularly get in 5-10minute chats with recordings and elaborate voicemails that affect some emotional valence to justify never answering a question... and that's faking a dynamic back and forth... not one off sniping.
Here's a automatic recording/telemarketer bait that lasted 14 minutes
KulakRevolt
2yr ago
There's a "Drunken Boxer" Style that works very well for prominent businessmen and celebrities... Think Trump, Kanye, and Elon...
Th "Drunken Boxer" either isn't drunk, or is a martial artist who's vastly less drunk than he looks, but he feigns drunkenness to the point of almost falling over to get his opponents to lower their guard, or taunt, and create openings...
You have and/or feign instability, have a crack team backing you up, and then you wind up coming out of situations with way more than you should have ever been able to realistically negotiate out of it... because none of your adversaries could actually gauge what your intentions where, couldn't assess what were the points where they should have pushed or played hardball... and then you get insane openings where none of the republican frontrunners will challenge Trump (the main frontrunner) because they all assume its a publicity stunt and won't waste ammunitition on a guy who won't be there in a month, or Hillary directing all her media allies to pump him because she thinks he's a joke and is worried she might have to debate Rand Paul on policy.
Insane openings no other businessman or candidate would get, but that is just handed to him because he's both thought a fool, and those smart enough to realize he's not a complete fool still have no idea what he actually wants and whether or not they should be trying to deny it to him.
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Now of course you can attribute too much 4d chess to this... how much is trump just being boisterous and good at playing the media + dumb luck... might Kanye actually just be bipolar... etc. But these people have teams behind them who aren't insane even if the front man might be, and you'll get this dynamic just out of that...
Elon is by far the most likely of these figures to do it consciously. He's the most successful businessman of them, has been a successful businessman for decades, and pours tons into his media game, despite being the one with the least need for media presence... he isn't a politician or celebrity. He's a tech/car CEO. Can you even name the CEO of Toyota from memory? How about Salesforce or Raytheon?
And yet he's out their playing crazy on TV when he could be relaxing with his money and taking a break from the office.
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You notice you don't know if he even wants to own twitter? None of us do. That's a very powerful negotiating position.
The way I see it there's 2 -3 possibilities.
Elon put himself in this position with billions of his dollars on the line, that's a calculated move... all of this was almost certainly gone over by teams of people before he announced and was likewise poured over for weeks and months before even the preliminary stuff was signed.
So there's 3 possibilities:
A) He wants Twitter and is trying to avoid having the purchase blocked. B) He doesn't want twitter but wanted to create a "mask off" political story where he could play victim of censorship and institutional corruption C) Either outcome is agreeable to him, and he's oscillating back and forth to see how much damage/profit he can get out of it.
Whenever he gets close to getting twitter suddenly a major institution Twitter itself, the media, SEC, Biden security state make an announcement to try and block it... but when he signals he doesn't want twitter all those same institutions try to force the sale out of anger/recognition of an enemy, to try and punish him/extract resources out of him... Well if he's had his ducks in a row from the start and they're just being reactive, (which is likely since he's initiated the whole affair and had the best lawyers looking at it the whole time (whereas the people discussing a security review, or the twitter team are at most reacting within weeks)
Then its very likely every time he 180s and all these institutions shift 180 as well to try to make him pay, punish him, set an example... There's a very good chance his negotiating power increases on both ends.
For example the security review would probably give him an off-ramp if the market shifts and he doesn't want to buy, but doesn't want to pay the 1 billion damages he didn't back out, state department blocked him (how scandalous) or every legal trick the twitter team uses to try and hurt him in the trial for backing out ... '"Your honour we're even willing to assist him with the loan a 500 million value we don't have to"' Oh really!?
Its very likely his negotiating position is improving every twist this takes if he's done it right and planned it out well... which given he and his lawyers initiated it and his budget exceeds almost every other actor... probably.
KulakRevolt
2yr ago
That's not a quote from the piece...or at all relevant to the discussion...
Did you read it? Are you a bot?
I'm noticing more and more of these low effort, inflammatory, really detached comments that look like they're copy-pasted from completely different discussions on the Motte, and when you dig into the accounts its all equally detached comments seemingly building cache/ paper trails so the accounts can can be used for brigading later... both pro-russia, pro-ukraine... both left and right.
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I know the discussion that quote is from and notably it doesn't even match the context in that discussion (which used the quote as an example of poor intellectual standards in commentary on the war)
KulakRevolt
2yr ago
Notably Canada's also set for a much harsher recession than the US.
Both Toronto and Vancover have massive percentages of their economy and employment tied up in selling real estate to the world's wealthy that just isn't the case in the US outside NYC or California...
If housing crashes it will become a reinforcing cycle since thenhundreds of thousands employed in real estate would lose their jobs and be forced to downsize their houses.
Canada is actually a much poorer country than the US... depending on the swing of the dollar it's per capita GDP is closer to 40k compared with America's 60k... Canada is far more comparable with France where 1mil will buy you a literal castle in terms of it population's actual income... so if the housing market falls out, its probably not going to come back for a generation... especially when you consider Chinese migration and money is drying up
KulakRevolt
2yr ago
Please keep the commentary to the piece linked from my guest author... not an unlinked piece from me.
for those curious this is the piece he's discussing
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not discussing the linked piece is actually ironic because the Air Defence piece is the exact kind of technical, non-culture waring, moving the discussion forward cerebral work that my rage fueled rant is criticized for not being.
Ya these are quotes from this piece
which as a rage fueled bonus content rant I'm perfectly fine with being more culture warring and lighter on content.
Oof... You're being very harsh on my guest contributor.
He's done a series on military matters that touch on and about Ukraine I'm going to be hosting (of which this is the lightest content), in addition to my usual output, that I've found quite interesting/informative.
Thus my decision to host him.
For reference though this doesn't affect my output... my recent lightness is down to travel and illnesses picked up in airports
KulakRevolt
2yr ago
Ya my personal knowledge/feel comes from stuff like Wargame and Highfleet too.
Goppy is vastly more knowledgeable about a lot of this stuff, that's part of the reason I wanted to host him.
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The thing with IR is the range is vastly more limited than with Radar. That's why they get deployed in manpads and air to air missiles instead of longer range anti-air systems.
Usually they're either combined with radar detection, fired, and then the Ir kicks in at a certain point once they've closed with the target (in which case your initial active radar use is giving away your position anyway), or they're used from ranges short enough that IR alone works.
obviously specific ranges are classified... But IR detection of people and vehicles from a $50-100k bubble on a plane or observation tower was 14km when I was Researching my motorcycle warfare piece and i'd imagine you wouldn't get much better than 30km even trying to hit a jet engine against an empty backdrop... just the amount of atmospheric moisture you're looking through at that range is going to scatter IR information
By contrast the radar systems covered in the piece are detecting and locking on 100-150km away.
KulakRevolt
2yr ago
How the hell does a government bureaucracy run on not just the spoken word of a bureaucrat, but a convicted felons spoken memory of the spoken word of a bureaucrat?
Merely speaking a lie should be insufficient to cast an illegal ballot like its insufficient in every single other advanced country. Canada, the UK, France, you have to show ID and prove with physical documents your eligibility to vote. Address changed? Show the paperwork. Citizenship status changed? Show the paperwork. Name Changed? Show the paperwork.
Only in America is the fate of the nation riding on the honor system. And only in America would it be considered a scandal that you'd hold someone accountable for being demonstrably wrong in such a system.
"But he claims some rando he can't remember told him he could do it" We should totally remove the very last post facto enforcement mechanism we have that even pretends this is secure, because now that we've narrowed it down to just personal honor we find we're uncomfortable punishing people for being wrong on matters of honor.
KulakRevolt
2yr ago
If only there was a voter role system that was actually kept up to date, such that these cases would be resolved weeks in advance, and any questionable points dealt with before the election... some kind of registry to vote, such as parties and most nations have...
But one party systematically refuses to allow either voter ID laws, or any securing of the voter registry... leaving effectively an honor system for voting in America. Well if you're going to leave it unsecure enough we're trusting felons' word as to whether or not they're entitled to vote, then there has to be consequences for being wrong.
You could have secure elections where none of these people would be able to vote at all unless it was explicitly signed off by an authority that they had cleared their felony restriction... instead you're taking them at their word, now its just down to whether there are consequences when you prove their word is wrong.
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I worked elections in Canada in another life... there was no way for anything like the regular "Mistakes" that happen in the American system because of all the ID and paperwork you are required to show and clerks required to document.
KulakRevolt
2yr ago
THe thing is as soon as you have real protections of free speech woke is outcompeted.
What's the law of the internet: Every unmoderated forum inevitably become right wing?
Genuinely free communication norms without backdoor payment processors removal or state pressured "inclusion" inevitably becomes the 2000s era internet.
The institutional punishments are what drives woke... its not an ideology that can exist without institutional punishment... the current brand of it started on campus in the 2010s because the federal government preassured universities to change their enforcement of sexual harassment codes.
KulakRevolt
2yr ago
Insider trading is part of a free market, as is market cornering, price manipulation etc. It is only state intervention that can make these schemes stable. If the milk cartels in Canada had been only private unenforceable agreements they would have collapsed decades ago.
As for corrupt government land dealings, etc. ... why yes the 5-10 areas of economics the state already touched back then were entirely corrupt... who would have thought. Thank god now the state infects every aspect of the economy and none of it is... oh wait.
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In the 19th century people like Edison and the Wright brothers could invent in their garages and call their workers racial or sexual slurs if they wanted... now all research is regulated, all corporate speech, and all private speech by anyone employed is strictly regulated by the state with 100 million dollar settlements if an employer is insufficiently hawkish about firing employees for speech infractions, and there is not a single sector of the economy that is remotely free and we are slaves.
KulakRevolt
2yr ago
You underestimate the level of horror.
The average person doesn't just not know how things work... They know as a matter of objective fact that they're hostilely designed to take agency away from them.
It is not only a pain in the ass that all cars have computers, it is now illegal to make new ones that don't have computers, those computers ensure you can't do maintenance on your own car, the user agreement might make it literally illegal to do that maintenance via cracks and work arounds, and the government is passing new regualtions so that your car will have remote automatic shutoffs, and maintain tracking data, so that it will betray you if you ever try to run from the state, and bear witness against you at your trial.
That's just cars. Computer software for the past 20 years has only gotten worse for 90% of users, going from an objest you owned and could install, to a permanent relationship tying you into dependence on hostile corporate entities you are now a permanent funder of... if Adobe decides they don't want you to be able to create certain images, they can just update your copy of photoshop to make it automatically stop you... sound far fetched? Try photocopying a dollar bill. The machine will detect what you're doing and override you. That isn't even software as a service, that's hardware.
Then there is the near permanent surveillance enabled by all the apps you literally must have to not be shut out of the economy and rendered homeless, the constant assault on your attention and hostile design meant to distract you that you must constantly fight on social media, which you also can't opt out of because that's now how business, romance, communtity organizing and basic socializing is done and you'll die alone and abandoned if you don't give in and feed your personal data and waning atttention to it...
and then even if you accept that as the cost of doing business those systems supposedly objective results are manipulated by people who hate you
to politically disempower you and destroy the last bits of resistance you could possibly muster.
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Technology has not advanced in America... If we define technology as allowing people to get what they want: Improve their lifestyle, secure shelter, secure social relations, travel... Every aspect of American technology, from cars, to air travel, to office tech has only gotten worse since the 1980s.
Hell flying cars existed in the 1910s (teenagers could fly the Focker Dr3 and it would fit in a double wide garage), Nuclear batteries and freighters existed in the 60s, we had lighter than air freight service in the 20s.
By rights international trade should be dominated by 3000ft nuclear powered zepplins by now, and personal travel by cheap prop planes (you can not tell me just reproducing the Dr3 is more expensive than the modern nisan)
Theil made the case that American technology had advanced in the world of bits, but not atoms, because the world of atoms has been regulated to death...
I disagree America has advanced. Outside of surveilling the population, killing foreigners, and safety features no one would willing pay for and thus have to be regulated... America has only regressed. Housing is uglier, smaller, and more expensive anywhere anyone wants to live, cars are uglier and more expensive (no GM factory worker is getting a new one every 2 years)... even in the realm of health any gain to lifespan has been more than offset by obesity and chronic disease destroying the quality of youth. Hell lifespans have even stopped rising...
The one thing this society values, being safely infirm longer, and even that one metric is reversing.
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The age of "The Social Network" has seen an implosion of relationship formation! An implosion so catastrophic the greatest geopolitical factor is now population implosion.
The state and society are antithetical. Per hobbes society is the group of men agreeing to resolve their disputes through appeal to the sovereign... the sovereign is not a party to this deal, and remains forever in the state of war.
Thus societies ample ability to liquidate the state...
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