Mewis
1yr ago
It sounds like you can write, you just find it very difficult and unpleasant. Which is not unusual, since I have heard this comment from many people.
The circumstance that every so often, this problem briefly just goes away and I can in fact vomit out several pages that do in fact hold up even if I look at them again later, just makes my problem all the more frustrating - it feels like it's not like there is something I just lack (and therefore could obtain, making the problem go away), but rather that the necessary circuitry is there but defective.
That sounds more like that your circuitry is functional, but you have problems with environment or mood that interfere. That's good because you can control your environment and your mood (to an extent). Think back to those times when you succeeded in writing and think about whether your situation was different, or maybe you did something immediately beforehand that put you in the right state. Having a pre-writing ritual can help deal with procrastination and also put you in the writing mood, even if it's as simple as taking a walk or talking to a particular person.
Mewis
1yr ago
You'd have to be very much a quokka indeed to be so anti-war as to oppose bleeding out someone who you're still in a nuclear stalemate with. As an American, every day I open my eyes with a Russian warhead pointed me, ready to slaughter my family. So pardon me if I cheer on Ukraine's humiliation of Russia's armed forces.
You do realize that things can always get worse? A humiliation of Russia might make you feel better about having a sword over your head, but you might be safer to try and keep the guy holding the sword feeling calm and secure rather than goading him. This isn't a game - if Americans really believe they're on the brink, they're not acting like it.
Mewis
1yr ago
Every war is clearly good versus evil for the first few months/years. It's only later that people begin to take a more nuanced view. Who, at the time, did not view WWI, II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the War in Iraq, the War in Afghanistan the same way? I recall the same quivering righteousness over Syria.
Mewis
1yr ago
If anything, being on the brink would make a nuclear exchange more likely. People are more likely to resort to violence or extreme measures when they feel their back is against the wall and they don't have any options. If Russia does not believe it could defend itself in a conventional war, and that the United States intends to destroy their country (which are both true, btw), they will look to non-conventional means of defense.
Escalation in Ukraine makes nuclear war substantially more likely, not less likely. Russia is more likely to resort to nuclear warfare if other options are not available to it. This is not to say that we should be willing to sacrifice all our interests in order to reduce the risk of a nuclear exchange. However, I do not think that humiliating Russia is actually in our interests, and if it increases the chance of nuclear war, we should avoid doing it. Your personal desire to see others degraded and humbled means nothing to me. Go kill ants if that's what gives you pleasure.
They've been bold enough to push their luck, I don't see why we shouldn't be too.
I don't think that the invasion of Ukraine is anything about Russia pushing their luck (beyond the more general principle that war is inherently unpredictable).
Appeasement, in other words?
In other words, I oppose invading Russia and launching ICBMs at Moscow.
Mewis
1yr ago
Reading abstruse political theory penned over a hundred years ago is much more an act of obedience than it is of independence. Slavish Marxist-Leninists are just as intellectually incurious as Ayn Rand cultists or fundamentalist Christians or modern antiracists. I think what you actually like is just people who are an intellectual match for you, which I agree is probably more important than how you prefer to waste that intellect.
Mewis
1yr ago
But you might ask, at what point does this Pollyanna-Putin outlook begin to crumble? When does the filter bubble burst, and Putin has his Downfall-style meltdown? When Ukraine liberates Kherson? Lysychansk? Donetsk? Sevastopol? I think the only answer we can give here is that people in general are very bad at facing up to uncomfortable realities, and can keep themselves from accepting painful truths for their entire lives if necessary. Or think of psychologist's Leon Festinger's now famous work on cognitive dissonance on doomsday cults: when the doomsday prophecy fails, people will go to great lengths to avoid accepting that they've been duped. I expect Putin to go out the same way, with his final thoughts being confidence that Russia can still be victorious, even as he has an unfortunate fall from a window.
I don't find this kind of psychological analysis to be that convincing. It's compelling to imagine Putin ranting at his generals in some palace and to pull out all sorts of diagnoses - he's a megalomaniac, he's a psychopath, he's delusional, he's paranoid, etc. But these kinds of assertions are made without evidence, and are constructed to support desired conclusions. The claim that Putin is insane or Hitleresque is made to justify war with Russia, and what Americans think of as the good kind of war - total war that doesn't stop until the entire country and government is destroyed. It is made to rule out the possibility of negotiation or normalizing relations.
In any case, Putin's interior psychology is not really that important. Russia is in a very bad place right now, but they really have no choice but to continue to believe that victory is possible. People can believe anything if they have to!
Mewis
1yr ago
If the war were somehow to stop now, it would be Russia which would take a few years to re-arm and re-group and then take the rest of Ukraine.
That seems highly unlikely given how poorly the war has gone so far, and could be prevented simply by inviting Ukraine into NATO.
Russia has made it clear that Ukraine is not a legitimate entity to them.
What does that have to do with anything?
Mewis
1yr ago
Anything political that doesn't directly and immediately affect you on a personal level is something that you should be concerned about only to a limited degree.
If white replacement ends in the destruction of your society and perhaps the deaths of you and your descendants in 50 years, as many replacement theory believers perceive, that would be a larger threat than the maybe 1% chance of a nuclear exchange tomorrow.
More broadly I don't think that this kind of 'I should only think about my personal and immediate interests and not give a shit about the broader society I live in or the long-term future' attitude actually holds up that well. It's a recipe for extreme short-termist thinking, a politics that is incapable of solving problems on any kind of significant time-scale. Coming from a country that I believe has been totally ruined by this kind of attitude, I am much more worried about what the country will look like in thirty years than whether someone might randomly invade us tomorrow.
Mewis
1yr ago
Yes, I think that 1% chance of a nuclear war tomorrow is high - I am using the word 'tomorrow' figuratively, to mean 'in the foreseeable future'.
Mewis
1yr ago
I think the mindset idea has some value - innate talent might be important, but for practical purposes, you can't change the genes you were born with, whereas you can practice hard. At the same time, it might be that people are better off trying to identify their talents and disposition and act in a way that matches them, rather than trying to shove their square self into a round hole.
Mewis
1yr ago
My understanding is that the issues with the British economy are structural and go back to the Blair government, which mostly rode a boom in financial services while sowing the seeds of our current issues. Britain is by this point, highly deindustrialized and heavily indebted, with poor infrastructure and an aging population, an economy built on cheap labour and a harsh regulatory environment. This is the result of decades of overconsumption and underinvestment by both the private industry, average people, and government. The longer the fall, the harder the landing, and Liz Truss is simply reaping the result, as much due to animal spirits as any particular decision. Her tax cuts are not particularly radical - they're more or less a return to the taxation levels of Blair. But fiddling with tax levels is only going to shift money between the UK population and the government. It is not going to make the country as a whole (population+government) any richer or poorer, it's pure redistribution.
Mewis
1yr ago
There's no reason why the UK can't bounce back. Many of our problems are entirely self-inflicted - the addiction to cheap labor, the highly restrictive planning system, the lack of investment, the total aversion of the government to supporting industry, and moronic environmentalism. Whether we will choose to stop sabotaging our own future is another question entirely. If the previous years are any indicator, the answer is no. Neither political party shows any interest in restricting immigration, investing in infrastructure, reforming the planning system, or supporting industry.
Mewis
1yr ago
Why should investment be directed towards businesses that don't grow? What would be the point in investing money into a business that isn't going to use that money to hire more staff, buy more equipment, open new locations etc.?
Company F reported gains in this quarter, but they weren't as much as last quarter and not as much as the market expected, so company F's shares reduce in price even though they still made a profit and are not in danger of going bust.
Why invest in them when you could invest in a company that is growing and improving?
Mewis
1yr ago
I recall reading somewhere that the only common thread among spies and defectors during the Cold War was that there was no common thread. Some turned cloak for ideological reasons. Others for personal gain. And still others for bizarre and inscrutable reasons. Many were severely unhappy in some way, but not all.
Mewis
1yr ago
The choice between taxation and services is not quite a false one, but at the same time, if the national GDP was 20% or more above what it currently is (and there is no reason it couldn't be, because the national GDP hasn't grown over the 2007 level), it would give way more room for maneuver, and we wouldn't see this same lack of confidence from markets.
Britain isn’t suddenly going to achieve efficiency gains that no other western country ever has
Maybe not, but the current situation is in part a result of the UK's GDP growth being consistently behind nearly every other developed economy. The United States have managed to grow their economy substantially over the past 15 years. There's no reason we can't too.
The country’s problems aren’t intractable - many other countries have and do face them, but the solution isn’t to magic up efficiency, it’s to make the tough choices that other countries make, ones grounded in simple economics, rather than rationalist magic.
And yet, the country consistently punts on those tough questions, and we fall further and further behind. Time and time again the country chooses to consume and consume, and never to invest or to build for the future. The tough choice to make is not whether we increase taxes or cut spending. It's between consumption and investment.
Mewis
1yr ago
That makes sense. A lot of academic improvement is just down to getting older and smarter.
Mewis
1yr ago
The US did a pretty good job keeping the Kabul government in power. It was only after the US withdrew direct military support that it collapsed.
Mewis
1yr ago
Well said - whether it's spun as 'face' or 'prestige' or 'credibility', ultimately what matters is power and money. China is constantly embarrassing themselves with ludicrous overblown rhetoric and saber-rattling - their envoys still get received gratefully in the courts of the world, because they have money.
The thing is that a talented wordcel can always spin any course of action as being somehow conducive to 'credibility'. The Iraq War was originally intended not as nation building, but as a muscular demonstration of American military power and willingness to use it unilaterally against their enemies. Such a demonstration was hardly necessary - the destruction of two skyscrapers, though tragic, was not read by anyone as proof of imminent collapse of American hegemony. Once the war was concluded, the Credibility Fans simply shifted their reasoning. Now, rebuilding Iraq was necessary to restore American cred in the wake of disaster.
Meanwhile, Russia's efforts to gain credibility appear to be losing it credibility.
Would allowing Ukraine to join NATO without a peep have restored credibility? No, I think not. Rather, Russia is being exposed as weaker and more fragile than anyone supposed.
Mewis
1yr ago
Haiti as an asset is probably a net negative - it relies on international charity to stay fed and produces very little of value. Assuming this would-be king was liable for the debts and maintenance of the nation, he should not pay anything at all. If anything he should be paid, and extremely well.
Mewis
1yr ago
That's not what NATO has said in the past (I believe the United States said that Ukraine would be allowed to join a few years ago) and it's not what Ukraine is saying now.
But you know, commentators like you would have told us that of course Poland or the Baltics or Finland would never be allowed to join NATO in the mid-90s. A commitment, like others, that the United States reneged upon. Funny how doing stuff like that isn't damaging to 'credibility' - almost like the only thing that matters in international relations is power and money. Russia's mistake was being weak and poor, and now all that's left is to decide whether they want to lose now or later.
Mewis
1yr ago
Internationally, yes. I understand that this kind of bombast does well domestically, though.
Mewis
1yr ago
I think it's interesting that Poland sees Ukraine as a friend. Didn't Ukraine basically carve the western part of their country out of former Polish territory (killing the Poles that lived on it)? Or is this more of a conscious choice to ignore the various ethnic purification projects that formed the current map of Europe, because they know that it would be dangerous to reopen that topic?
Mewis
1yr ago
I think we both agree that Russia should not have gone to war in the first place. But again, that would just be choosing a slow death rather than a quicker one. Ukraine would have been integrated into NATO, and then Russia could have been destroyed at Washington's leisure.
The United States did not really make a commitment, because I don't believe that commitments or agreements between enemies are binding. Commitments that cannot be enforced don't exist, and Russia is demonstrating right now their inability to enforce anything even on their own doorstep. But they certainly let the Russians think they made such a commitment!
That more or less explains why it can't happen. If the goal of the West is to weaken or destroy Russia, then it benefits them to drag the war out as long as possible.
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