RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
27d ago
No, America is a very small part of these people's lives (the rich old ones that is, different for students of course). All of those things that you mention are to be looked down on. Beyonce - awful. NFL - awful. Jay Z (and rap music generally) - awful. California - awful. Iraq - awful. Guns - awful. Progressiveness - awful, especially if its something serious like pronouns being used ungrammatically or shoddy academic writing about decolonization/progressive issues (but they would not dare say that in public). Trump and anyone associated with Trump with the exception of Pence - awful awful awful and they'll say it out in public. Coca Cola - awful. Microsoft - awful (but they have to use it anyway like anyone who wants to get things done). Israel - awful.
There was never much good about America with the possible exception of Harvard and whatever judges there are that stand up to Trump. Now the whole country is descending into fascism as far as they're concerned.
Classical FM. Opera. ABC News (the Australian ABC that is, the state broadcaster). British television (Yes Minister, Would I lie to you, Top Gear, Clarkson's Farm). British youtubers. The Sydney Morning Herald. The Guardian. The Conversation. The European Union. Florence. Venice. Rome. Paris. London. Cambridge. Oxford. The Times. The Economist. Fresh food. That's where it's at.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
28d ago
What do you think of the small-sized war between coal miners and police in the 1920s? To an extent I think you're saying 'things started to go wrong with Jim Crow and maybe the LA riots'. But some of the biggest unrest in the US had little to do with race.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
Or the British using troops. They didn't have police back then so cavalry would do the work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre#Cavalry_charge
I think there's always been a certain heavier-handed aspect to policing when going beyond mere law enforcement into the political realm of what laws should there even be, how should power be distributed, who is in control. It's not a post-WW2 thing but an eternal thing. Riots and aggressive policing are two sides of the same coin, it's about showing who's in control in a visceral way.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
28d ago
These are wealthy people who go to Europe just about every year on holidays
I am not in fact talking about Europeans! I'm talking/thinking about Australians, an American student in Australia, a Canadian...
The Economist article was cope I think, US median consumption is higher than Australia's. But Australians work less, live longer and have higher median wealth. There's not a significant difference I think.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
29d ago
It's not an unsparing look at how life really is, it's a look at how life could be in a deeply alien world. It explicitly says that 'this doesn't work on Earth because one man can't stand above many on pure power alone'. There's social commentary to an extent about the role of individuals and society but it's not Earth society. This is another world treated on its own terms, an extreme world because extremes are where things break down.
There are some universal thematic lessons but it's more stuff about persevering and treading one's path and not getting tied down by the expectations of others, desires for freedom.
Also, it didn't get banned for being excessively gruesome but because the author seemed to reference real political figures, which is a big no-no apparently. You certainly can't have anyone called Xi Xingping in your web serial. Truly inexplicable authorial decisions...
I'm not really a law/judges guy, I think detailed investigations of individual cases should be left to lawyers. I'm trying to compare ideologies around the world on a high level.
Isn't the burden of proof on OP to show how powerful the conservative Catholics are, the literati, the counter-elite? Where are their wins? What is he gesturing at, that's what I want to know. I don't see any power projection. MAGA can project power, deportations are active. The neocons project power, wars are active. They push forward, they represent a significant change to the status quo. You can see and hear and sense power projection on the TV, you don't need to go to scotusblog to find out about it.
Is he saying that conservative Catholics are instrumental in mass deportations or the war on Iran? That would surprise me! The point OP made is that the conservative Catholics were a counter-elite, they were running all these universities and books and so that means they're winning very slowly... but nobody ever heard of this Senior guy. That's my point. I don't think universities and books or Mr Senior matter if people haven't heard them and we can't observe any clear, significant effects from their activism.
The Warren Court projected power, they made schools desegregate, they made schools bus kids around, they were part of the process that ended with 101st Airborne marching around Arkansas with bayonets fixed, enforcing a new social policy. Or the due process revolution, giving criminals a leg up, making police read out these rights. Abortion legalized nationwide. That's power.
A judge in Kansas decided that schools were segregated and so mandated that so much money be spent on them that white students would be brought back by how nice they'd be. Billions were spent on planetariums, swimming pools. He doubled property taxes. That's power!
More recently: Gay marriage! It's a thing all of a sudden, country-wide. Changing a fundamental social rite.
Now you can say that's just banning things, just like the cases I mentioned. But the Warren Court and some judge in Kansas were banning or enforcing actively and transformatively. The conservative Catholics on the Court don't have that same pushing power to them. There's no elaborate anti-discrimination regime that puts money in the hands of Catholics, is there? What about setting up a lawfare regime that crushes abortion? Why not make abortion providers meet a standard of safety so rigorous that they're effectively put out of business: they have to use surgery so delicate there's never any scarring?
That pushing power doesn't exist and I don't need to read legal arguments to observe that, I can look and check a statistic about facts on the ground.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
29d ago
There's something in Western Fantasy where the love of power is undermined. In the Wheel of Time Rand spends so much time agonizing and waiting and only rarely does anything when he's insanely strong. Or in Worth The Candle it problematizes power, there's so much about being a good person and emotional maturity. The whole story is kind of therapeutic apologia for being a bit mean in a D&D session.
Taylor in Worm was pretty good and selfless all things considered and the Worm subreddit was going 'yeah she's problematic and an unreliable narrator and flawed.'
Meanwhile in RI it goes full-bore. Ritual sacrifice, realpolitik, betrayal, warlordism (real warlordism, not being a nice gangster like Taylor), mass-murder and a relentless pursuit of power. Emotional maturity is knowing how to bide time and endure humiliations while scheming, how to endure losses or avoid distraction - not therapy talk. Good and evil, freedom and destiny explored on a grand and fantastical scale, not a petty scale.
Lots of people outside America don't like America and it's not about US strength or wealth, it's not envy but genuine distaste. They just do not like US culture or lifestyle or demeanour. They think that its weird to swear allegiance to the flag in schools, they think it's weird to have all these guns and fireworks and huge cars. They think Americans are crass and stupid and unwise. They go to America and find it really weird and hostile, all these drug adverts on TV, all these homeless people about, people actually approaching you and trying to make conversation on the street. Tipping. It's all weird. They aren't going to America again and will openly tell others not to go to America either. These are wealthy people who go to Europe just about every year on holidays, or boomers that go on cruises and tell me in detail how much they dislike Americans on cruises.
I was talking with a student from the US and I was trying to make the point (albeit in a more polite and appropriate way) that if it weren't for US power Australia would probably have been raped to death by Japan in WW2 so there are pluses as well as minuses about American militarism. But she was going on about how the pledge of allegiance was weird and just innately unacceptable. She was feeling the same kind of laboured 'you're obviously wrong, why do I even have to defend this' that I was feeling.
I make points in a separate conversation with an Australian professor about how the US economy is growing a lot faster than the Australian economy despite the US making a mess with tarriffs so they're doing some things right that we should emulate but even fairly sophisticated people like her say 'no, it's too unequal, there's too much extreme wealth and poverty and that's bad for democracy'. Or they regurgitate an Economist article about how the US is 'islands of affluence' in a sea of relative poverty. It's like saying that 'maybe we should build infrastructure in a more efficient way' and this reflexive answer pops up 'well China can only do that because they have slaves, there's probably a good reason that for HS2 they're building tunnels in open countryside.' Try saying anything positive about China to the average educated person in the West and they will probably refuse or deflect or mitigate. Well it's the same with America.
It's like the mirror image of Americans being super gung ho about America:
You're from the global military and economic hegemon that composes more than 60% of the world stock market cap.; no need to be embarrassed by it. Normies need a lesson in yes_chadding.
Normies overseas are no_chadding. No matter the GDP or the stock markets they don't give a damn, America sucks. Not to mention the wars and tariffs that keep dragging in or imposing costs on US allies. Americans could say 'We're so rich' and that wouldn't matter, it only confirms disgust that is rooted in culture, not wealth.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
29d ago
It's true that the burden doesn't rest entirely on the Supreme Court, there are things you can do without the court, more bottom-up ways to impose pressure.
But OP's point is all 'elites are great for policy wins' and my question is where are the policy wins? The only things I can find are the most limp-wristed defensive actions. You can't win by defending alone.
In your example, the Court could've said 'you can't discriminate against weed people' as a defensive action.
But they could also reinterpret the US constitution such that there is a right to access weed. What about the pursuit of happiness, doesn't that include weed? It's pretty silly but courts have done much sillier and more unjust things.
LLMs shouldn't be opining on politics in the same way paid shills shouldn't, there's something insincere about it. They're explicitly trained to have a political stance. They reflect on the companies that make them after all. They are like paid employees and not free citizens. Talking politics or arguing with a paid employee about politics is no good.
Whereas having someone program something for you is standard.
How can the achievements of LLMs in programming be denied? It's an objective fact, they can do these things.
Also I genuinely don't think that they're dumb or boring outside of programming. I could talk with an LLM for an hour about history, economics, technology, finance or fiction and it's suddenly near midnight. There is a lot of depth in long-context and long prompts where one can get out of 'surface-level' talk. Unfortunately, the main use-case is agentic coding where prompt adherence is very important. So the creativity can be hard to access as it rigorously tries to obey what you told it to do.
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