MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7hr ago
I chose Suetonius' Twelve Caesars (in English translation, natch) as a school prize, and everyone except the Latin teacher wanted to squee about how intellectual and committed to classical scholarship I was. He had recommended the book, and knew exactly what a tween boy was hoping to get out of it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
11hr ago
This is a fringe view. The majority position is that Imam Mahdi will reappear first, and then he will lead the forces of Islam to liberate Palestine and defeat the West.
And note that this is a general point about escheatology. Treating end-times prophecies as warnings about events that will happen in the future by manifest divine intervention (with no-one to know the day or the hour) is effectively harmless.
The dominant interpretation of Christian escheatology in Catholicism and mainline Protestantism is preterist - i.e. that most of the apocalyptic prophecies in Revelation etc. were already symbolically fulfilled by the destruction of the Temple after the 66-73 Jewish-Roman war and the expulsion of the Jews from Palestine after the 132-135 Bar Khoba Rebellion, but it isn't dogma. Treating it as a symbolic roadmap for contemporary geopolitics is something that only happens in American evangelicalism, and even then it is a minority view. (The most popular escheatology in American evangelicalism is the Rapturism of the Left Behind novels, which are mainstream in the limited sense that they treat Revelation as a warning and not an instruction manual, and they predict that the prophecies will be fulfilled by manifest divine intervention and not human action)
Similarly, in Judaism the Third Temple movement (which seeks to actually act out parts of the Messiah prophecy) is fringe even within religious Zionism.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
12hr ago
Before the events of the various Watch books, policing in Anhk-Morpok is provided by a criminal gang that has cut a corrupt deal with Vetinari (the Thieves' Guild) to fund itself by explicitly permitted arbitrary confiscation from citizens (thief licenses). That is corrupt by modern standards.
Vetinari comes across, and this is deliberate on the part of Pratchett who has said that he is modelled on, among others, Machiavelli, as someone who would cheerfully engage use aggressive war, assassination, torture etc. as policy tools if there was a way to do so to advance what he really cares about, which is the good of the city. But Pratchett's worldview (which I share) means that there rarely is - Ankh-Morpok works as well as it does because those things are rare. Also, if there was wetwork to be done for raison d'etat then he would outsource it to one of the dodgier guilds, so his hands would stay clean from the reader's perspective.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
America is a pretty chauvinistic and patriotic country but tomorrow if news came out that negotiations were underway to sell American Samoa or Puerto Rico or Guam, most people would actually not care.
If the American government announced that they had negotiated the sale of Guam to Japan, I don't think anyone except a few right-wing diehards would care, although if the local population protested the sale people might start caring.
If the Chinese announced that they expected America to sell Guam, and that they would cut off the rare earth supply if America did not, then I would expect the resulting outrage to make it politically impossible to sell Guam to China as a matter of US domestic politics.
There are two differences here: one is whether the territory is being sold to an ally or an enemy, and the other is that giving up inhabited territory in the face of threats is generally considered dishonorable. Trump managed both to sound like an enemy to most of western Europe (not clear if he is or not) and sound like he was making threats (which he clearly was, although it isn't clear how serious they were).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Technically Francis was a Jesuit, although he saw St Francis of Assisi as a role model and frequently talked like an pietistic Franciscan. Based on the stereotypes the various Orders had back in the day, I would expect a Franciscan to resort to the kind of soft-headed pacifism that generally makes you a useful idiot for the aggressor, an Augustinian to intelligently but not necessarily productively apply Just War theory, and a Jesuit to make a political calculation based on what they thought the interests of the Church were.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Essentially all open-borders supporters on this site are libertarians. The standard model of libertarian ethics assumes that ownership of land is, as a matter of morally binding property rights, unitary except when limited by explicit contract, and that the current freeholder is the legitimate owner and the rights claimed by the State are usurped.
Libertarianism is largely an American movement, and in the American context this is justified by saying that the rights of landowners were mostly acquired by a series of voluntary transactions beginning with the natural-law title acquired by a homesteader (and that the exceptions can be ignored as a matter of expediency) whereas the rights of the State were acquired by usurpation under the threat of violence. Ignoring the historical argument about the nature of American homesteading, or about what fraction of US land has been subject to a nonlibertarian transaction that would break the chain of natural-law title, this theory is obviously false when applied to other countries.
So from a traditional libertarian perspective, the difference is that you own your land and the government does not own the country. The government has the right to exclude foreign citizens (or to admit them under arbitrary conditions) from land which it acquired by voluntary purchase, as does any other corporation which legitimately owns land, such as the one owning @celluloid_dream's data centre.
Within the classical liberal tradition, we make the analogous argument in terms of freedom of association. If I wish to associate with Jose, and he is willing to travel to associate with me, but the government won't let him, then my freedom of association is restricted. If we are able to associate in ways which don't violate generally applicable laws or impose large externalities on my fellow-citizens (i.e. Jose is not a criminal or a bum) then this is an unreasonable restriction on the freedom of association of a citizen.
You can make exactly the same kind of argument about private landlords - there is a reason why clauses in leases restricting the tenant's visitors are generally unenforceable except in situations like group houses where the tenant's visitors are inevitably going to be imposing externalities on the other residents.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Pratchett thus has sympathy for the idealists - consider Sergeant Carrot, or the good Omnians like Brutha or Mightily Oats - but ultimately he's closer to Vimes or Weatherwax or Susan Sto Helit.
And even more importantly, he is closer to Vimes as a matter of worldview, but he isn't on Vimes' side because there are no two sides to this question. Carrot and Vimes are absolutely and always on the same side. (And the one time it comes up, Vimes and Brutha are also on the same side). In the Discworld, Good is good no matter whether it is real or not. And part of what is good is systems that work - Vetinari reads as an amoral snake, but he is also consistently on the same side as Vimes and Carrot because what matters is that Anhk-Morpok remains safe, free and prosperous.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
There was in the nineteenth century, although their jurisdiction only ran within gunboat range of navigable waterways.
There is currently a hilarious social media row going on in the UK, that began with Nigel Farage saying he would cut off visas to citizens of countries demanding slavery reparations. It turned out that the British Green party officer responsible for campaigning around reparations for slavery and colonialism is a direct descendent of the last Oba of Lagos, who was deposed in 1851 by the West Africa Squadron (with the dynasty retaining most of its wealth) because he wouldn't stop selling slaves (mostly to Brazil by this point).
So the Green Party's campaign for British taxpayers to pay reparations for slavery is led by the descendant of a slaver, who personally benefitted from slavery more directly than any white Briton now living.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
That is what I was trying to say with my second option. Thanks for putting it more clearly.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Yes - SaaS raises prices for consumers because the total amount you can extract from a consumer over a multi-year subscription is significantly more than the highest price you can stick on a shrinkwrapped product with a straight face. But at constant EV of price paid, SaaS is better because you pay more for the successful purchases and cancel the stuff that doesn't work out for you, so trying a new product is a lower risk proposition.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
If Trump called for the slaughter of the first-born, self-reported MAGAs would poll 92% in favour of it. I'm not sure if this is because 92% of Trump's supporters are sufficiently keen to give the loyal answer to pollsters that they would claim to support the slaughter of the first-born, or whether it is because former Trump supporters who can't bring themselves to claim to support the slaughter of the first-born stop self-reporting as MAGA.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Average or above average does a lot of work here. The problem for women who train hard is not average guys, who some they could probably beat and some they probably cant based just on genetics. Its just that once a guy gets off his ass and gets into any kind of shape, the woman is toast.
Depending on the sport, I would say it is more likely to be high-school level athletes - and given the culture of American school sport the best high-school level athletes are training to a semi-professional standard. The boys' team that the US women's national soccer team trains against is a State all-star team of elite high school athletes, for example.
But a guy who has the necessary skills for the sport and a basically active lifestyle (American car culture means that most Americans who don't intentionally work out are couch potatoes, but this is not true elsewhere) but doesn't train is going to beat club-level women, and a decent club-level male athlete is going to beat elite women.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
The deciding factor against negotiations was, apparently, really stupid. Why on earth would the Iranians want to be taking handouts from the US like this?
That same week, Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff called from Geneva after the latest talks with Iranian officials. Over three rounds of negotiations in Oman and Switzerland, the two had tested Iran’s willingness to make a deal. At one point, they offered the Iranians free nuclear fuel for the life of their program — a test of whether Tehran’s insistence on enrichment was truly about civilian energy or about preserving the ability to build a bomb. The Iranians rejected the offer, calling it an assault on their dignity.
To be fair to the admin, this was the deal we ended up reaching with North Korea in the late 1990's. One of the engineers working on the nuclear reactor we built for the Norks was my bridge partner. With hindsight, I don't think it was a very good deal.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
Cutting the cost of well-drafted objections by an order of magnitude means that smaller, less objectionable projects will have well-drafted objections made against them.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
On the YIMBY side, it should in theory make it way easier to get permitting and to anticipate all likely objections
The problem is that objections can be generated based entirely on the papers in a way which becomes arbitrarily cheap given good enough LLMs, but even if they are anticipated responding to them may involve expensive activity in the real world, like bat surveys in the most notorious example. It seems to me that giving both sides LLMs will increase the number of "cheap to raise, expensive to rebut" objections.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
I think a strong case that a lot of the online censorship (e.g. not allowing people to have frank discussions about Trans rights—and, yes it’s Reddit’s trans rights discussion censorship which drove The Motte to have their own website instead of remaining on Reddit) we saw in the late 2010s and early 2020s was partly a result of EU overreach.
That the worst online censorship was around trans rights is strong evidence that it was not driven by pressure from the EU authorities - the offline push for censorship of sane views on trans issues was much stronger in the US than the EU. Given the weakness of free speech laws in Europe, the EU (and member states) could have openly censored unapproved views on trans issues the way they openly censored complaints about Muslim immigration, but they chose not to. The pattern of what got censored how hard on Reddit is most consistent with a bottom-up push for censorship by the powermods, and more consistent with top-down censorship directed by American lefties than European lefties.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
The largest problem with CSAM is people paying for it, because it creates an incentive to produce more, which involves the sexual abuse of kids. The good news (at least when this product is concerned) here is that most people are not skilled enough to hide financial transactions. "So you just create a bunch of wallets and then use mixers to move funds from a wallet linked to you to a wallet not linked to you" is not something most people will understand.
As of 1999, most people who downloaded paid kiddieporn online knew perfectly how to hide financial transactions - they used stolen credit cards. Operation Avalanche in the US found 35,000 credit card numbers and only made 100 arrests and various foreign offshoots including Operation Ore in the UK became fiascos because they arrested the legitimate owners of the stolen credit cards.
People who knowingly download paid kiddieporn know that they are committing a crime that society (rightly or wrongly) takes more seriously than small-time financial crime and that the material they are looking for is on a darker part of the dark web than advice on how to obfuscate financial transactions.
As a side notice, I find it especially ironic that the so-called Christian parties (e.g. CDU in Germany) are always championing these anti-tech measures. Half of them are in a church which a mere generation ago was systematically enabling priests to sexually abuse kids.
A quibble, but the Christian element of the German CDU is predominantly Protestant, and I am not aware of a large child abuse scandal in the German Lutheran Church. Catholic Bavaria has a different Christian Democratic party (the CSU) which is in near-permanent coalition with the CSU at the federal level, and obviously is guilty-by-association in the way you suggest.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
I never talk about Israel/Palestine with them because that makes brains switch off and people get angry.
The same approach works with pro-Israel American normies and pro-Palestine British lefties.
If there was a law against talking about the Israel-Palestine conflict unless you had lived in Israel or Palestine for at least ten years, the world would be a better place.
TV as the dominant medium across a wide range of IQs was taking us towards the post-literacy era, but the text-based internet probably pushed it back a couple of decades. Respite over, I now go full old fogey every time the content I want exists in Youtube videos or podcasts but not text-based websites.
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