Skibboleth
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
4mo ago
Was the life you had in Venezuela really that much worse than sitting on the frozen streets of a foreign country begging for money?
Yes.
The legal environment leads to somewhat capricious outcomes, but for the most part it is genuinely superior to be a legally precarious migrant worker in the US than a Venezuelan citizen in Venezuela. They wouldn't be coming otherwise. You might forgive the first wave of immigrants for having unreasonable expectations, but when they're telling their friends and relatives to come because it's better than Venezuela you should probably assume they believe it.
It took about 7 years for a sweeping "don't criticize the government" censorship bill to get passed (Sedition Act), though at least it was widely unpopular and they got rid of it.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
Eh, what’s the deal with Morgoth?
A central theme in the Silmarillion is that Morgoth is incapable of true creation - everything he creates is simply a twisted mockery of something made by Iluvatar.
Skibboleth
1mo ago
is this just more journalists trying to spin straw into gold?
Correct. For the first time in a while, we have a dead primary season with, effectively, two incumbents. Election coverage has gotten used to circus primary campaigns that last forever and have tons of candidates. This is also why you get people making hay out of Haley's primary performances pretending that pulling in 20% represents a serious threat to Trump instead of admitting that 95% of them will vote for Trump in the general. They need something to talk about.
For a long time I’ve thought the African American vote and especially the male one culturally belongs in the red tribe.
The Red and Blue tribes are both white. African Americans may have some cultural similarities to Red Tribe Whites, but there are many differences as well. Perhaps more importantly, very different interests. There may be a lot of socially conservative black men, but the GOP is going to have a hard time pulling their votes unless they can actually make a convincing case that they're going to support their interests. That's going to be a hard sell for a poor urban constituency than many existing conservative voters view quite negatively (meaning they're not going to want to make concessions to appeal to them).
Given the way things are going, the Palestinians (or at least the Gazans) will be remembered as perennial losers who wanted to kill Jews more than they wanted to survive. They didn't have to be fucked. There is a direct line between their refusal to back down from maximalist goals of destroying Israel and their present fate of slow strangulation.
I'd be willing to bet that if the Palestinians had adopted Gandhi's strategy, there'd be a Palestinian state right now. But nonviolent resistance until your adversaries are humiliated into submission isn't glamorous as war to the knife against your hated enemies. Hell, if they pursued a more regular unconventional war focused on Israeli military targets they might be there. But as long as they continue to preferentially target Israeli civilians and as long as they continue to assert their intention to destroy Israel there's no way the Israelis will compromise. And every so often there will some harsh reminder to the international community as to why.
Worth noting is that this observes that younger people aren't voting more conservative as they get older. I suspect that if you were to track their views longitudinally they would be getting more conservative, it just isn't translating into political preference.
A lot of this boils down to generational and regional factionalism, at least in the US. Millennials tend to regard the GOP as the party of rural reactionaries and selfish boomers, not stability and responsibility. In much the same way that economic enticements have failed to sustain Democratic support amongst poor rural whites in the face of barely disguised contempt and yawning cultural gulfs, the urbanized, educated millennials intuit that the Republicans are not Their Guys, even if they have more preference alignments than they used to.
Skibboleth
6mo ago
It's not simply a lack of mutually acceptable terms, it's also a lack of trust. Israel in particular doesn't trust (probably correctly) that if they made concessions, Hamas or other Palestinian organizations wouldn't just use that to expand their offensive capabilities and continue pressing for their extermination. That, in turn, shapes what terms are acceptable. The Israelis aren't likely to accept anything less than the total disarmament of the Palestinians, a) which the Palestinians will never agree to b) the Palestinians fear (probably correctly) that even if the vast majority of them acquiesce, any violence from remaining hardliners will be used as a pretext for further tightening the screws.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
Many have remarked how the cosmopolitan product manager/twitterati of New York, Toronto and Paris are much more similar to each other than they are to the Freedom Convoy, Gilets Jaunes or Dutch farmers dropping manure in highways and vice-versa.
Is this actually true? Or is its appearance just a consequence of contentious proximity? It might be easier for a New Yorker to get along with a Parisian than an Alabaman, but in some respects that's because they have less in common. French politics are inconsequential to the NYer, French culture a curiosity. People from Alabama and New York share a government and have to fight over how the pie gets divvied up, what the drug store can actually sell, and whether being gay is going to be illegal or mandatory.
Given the extent to which the caprice of individual judges can affect the outcome of your case, it is probably to your benefit to minimize weirdness and maximize respectability (and respectfulness). In an ideal world you could show up to court in a clown suit and not have it affect the outcome, but in reality the judge may feel disrespected, the jury may not take you seriously, etc...
If you were a pre-op transwoman going to court I'd recommend wearing a suit and tie even if it makes you uncomfortable. Life isn't fair.
Skibboleth
10mo ago
This has been the strategy from the start. Russia wants to bleed out Ukraine
It was not. Russia opened the (hot phase of the) war with a series of incredibly ambitious maneuvers and risky airborne operations, indicating they expected to be able to end the war very quickly. These efforts all failed, mostly disastrously (the southern axis of advance towards Odessa stumbled at the gates of Mykolaiv and :checks notes: Voznesensk?, but they still wound up in possession of Kherson Oblast and didn't get mauled, so massive W compared to the northern axes).
Some say the mysterious $6.2 billion accounting error was paid to Prig.
The people saying that are idiots. Not only do they have zero evidence, it doesn't make any sense. The "accounting error" was not a pile of cash or a number in a bank account. It's games with the valuation of equipment transfers.
I have my issues with limited government types (namely that they're frequently hypocritical or at least self-deluding), but this is really only a critique of the far end of the spectrum. Most people who want limited government don't want a government that limited - they still want publicly funded police and fire departments, infrastructure they use, courts, schools, etc... When they object to "big government", they're generally objecting to the welfare and regulatory state (or at least parts of it) and infrastructure they don't use.
Reductions to the welfare and regulatory state might increase social disorder to some degree, but there's clear historical example that it's not enough to render states nonviable.
Skibboleth
8mo ago
I don't know if this post is a parody or not, but I have to ask how anyone looks at Vivek Ramaswamy and doesn't clock him as an obvious grifter.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
I don’t understand fight antisemitism movement. Jews seem to be doing fine in this country.
The goal is presumably to maintain the norm that anti-semitism is unacceptable, rather than waiting until Jews are seriously considering heading for the exits before doing something.
your no longer allowed to have weird opinions.
I feel like "weird" is doing a lot of work here. Irving isn't being censured because he thinks Black NASA already landed on Europa or because he thinks the Earth is flat.
I wouldn’t be shocked if blacks are the next group to join the GOP. Lots of weird opinions in that community and basically anyone middle class has some wrong think so it’s clear that culturally their not a fit with Dems.
I would, and I find the recurring notion that any day now the black vote is going to break for the GOP absolutely baffling. I suspect it is mostly wishcasting.
African Americans are generally poor and poorly treated, and their political behavior is highly transactional as a result. Black communities may not have much cultural affinity for white liberals, but they don't have much in common with white conservatives either. As long as the liberals at least willing to pretend to take their concerns seriously and conservatives view their civil rights as a political liability, they're going to keep voting for the democratic party.
I’ve argued previously that the biggest liability of this New Right is free speech absolutism. So long as they incorporate a subculture which is really loudly invested in, say, using slurs, they will continue to polarize fresh enemies.
Is the New Right absolutist on freedom of speech or is it simply defensive about the unpopularity of its own speech? If we're identifying the New Right with people like, e.g., Sohrab Amari, they might use absolutist rhetoric when one of them gets banned from twitter, but then they'll turn around and argue for banning speech they disapprove of (and not in a 'ban from privately owned social media' sense).
This is a sticking point for me with Cowen's overall analysis - I don't think the New Right is rooted in libertarianism/classical liberalism at all. Amari and Dreher are integralists, Yarvin is the neoreactionary, Carlson is a bit of a chimaera but at heart seems to be a paleocon, etc... but the common thread of wanting to use state power to remediate culture war losses puts them quite far from classical liberalism (to say nothing of rising anti-capitalist sentiments).
I won't address the argument about whether or not the USA is about to become the HRE because I tapped out before I got to the part about how the Pritzker Khaganate is going to protect me from the unbearable tyranny of Joe Biden. Mostly because I immediately find the historical argument dubious and somewhat hard to follow. I have attempted to summarize the proposed theory of history as follows:
- There are centralizing eras, characterized by state formation and the centralization of power, and decentralizing eras, characterized by state collapse and decentralization of power.
- Centralizing eras occur because "technological and social gaps" (unclear what this means, as you don't elaborate) and "finicky, barely technological, advances that A) are not evenly distributed and allow the powers which have them to dominate the powers that don’t, and B) require vast numbers of hierarchically organized people working together in sophisticated coordination to make it work at all". Though you also say you don't really know why centralizing eras happen.
- Decentralizing eras occur because of "sophisticated capital and skill intensive weapons that can be utilized by relatively few people, and which are widely distributed", such as knights and castles.
- Centralizing eras are extremely rare (in fact, there are only two), decentralizing eras are very common.
I don't think this is a particular compelling model of history. The core concept relies on two gerrymandered categories and the basis for these categories is doubtful (being, essentially, technological determinism). If you want to argue that there are times and places in which centralization is happening and vice versa, that’s fairly trivial. This argument goes beyond that and makes the case for a sweeping theory of technologically-driven centralization/decentralization.
The understanding of centralizing eras listed above is borderline tautological: centralization happens when a particular polity musters enough state capacity to subjugate competing power centers. True, but not a remarkable observation. That is what centralization means. You point to transportation and communication technologies, and this is a fair point, but, in what is part of a wider pattern, you put the cart before the horse. The Roman Empire doesn't collapse because they forgot how to build roads; the Roman road network falls apart because the Empire responsible for maintaining it collapses. These empires generally collapse for institutional and political reasons, not because of disruptive technological changes. Alexander's short-lived empire fractured upon his death because it didn't have the political infrastructure for a stable succession. Likewise, the British Empire fell apart after WW2 because Britain no longer had the will or means to keep ahold of its overseas territories (i.e. it was broke, exhausted, and had America breathing down its neck), not because technological diffusion made it no longer viable.
The argument that decentralizing eras occur because of the aforementioned capital/skill intensive weapons doesn't seem to hold much water either. The militaries of the Greek city-states, which you cite as an example of a decentralized era, were defined by citizen-militias. The hoplite was not an elite warrior-aristocrat; in most cases he wasn't even particular well-trained. The same is often true in other times and places as well - Anglo-Saxon armies, for example, had better equipped warrior elites, but the body of the army was comprised of militia. This pattern holds to a lesser degree even after the Norman conquest and into the early modern period - English armies are generally less aristocratic than their continental counterparts (this is painting with a very broad brush – there were comparably plebian continental armies). So, I don’t think you can say that decentralized eras are particularly defined by capital and skill intensive weapons. Sometimes they have them, sometimes they don’t.
Conversely, centralized states have forms of warfare that are almost unfathomably more capital intensive than their decentralized counterparts. No medieval polity is going to field a Romanesque army, not because they don't want to but because they can't. They can't afford to pay (or feed) hundreds of thousands of lavishly equipped professional soldiers and they couldn’t organize it even if they had the money. And as we move towards the modern era the preeminence of the knight starts to fall away - not merely because of gunpowder (though it doesn’t help), but because the re-emergence of disciplined heavy infantry and political structures capable of supporting increasingly large and increasingly professional armies. Those capital and skill intensive weapons are more likely to be found in the hands of centralized states who can afford to maintain specialized soldiers (e.g. gunners) and their equipment than decentralized entities, who are often stuck buying sophisticated weaponry if they can field it at all.
Lastly, as I said, I don't think you can sensibly talk about broad eras of centralization or decentralization without engaging in categorical gerrymandering. You cite only two examples of centralizing eras: the Alexander to Caesar era (no dates specified, so I'll just say about 334 BC to 116 AD, though I am unconvinced this marks a coherent 'era') and the modern era (1700-1945 AD). But this is what I mean when I say categorical gerrymandering – you’re arbitrarily excluding all manner of counter-examples for unclear reasons. Why only these? We've had the same two polities in the Iberian peninsula for the past 500 years after a centuries-long Reconquista, the Qin/Han Dynasties lasting for about 400 years (in fact China, despite no lack of turbulence, usually managed to pull itself back together fairly quickly), Turkish expansion, multiple Persian Empires, etc... In many cases you have periods of rapid centralization followed by rapid fragmentation (e.g. Alexander’s conquests, the Carolingian Empire). Should we count these as decentralizing or centralizing?
You acknowledge a few of these but then casually dismiss them: 'But the fact I’m giving individual dynasties or empires as “the era” kinda tells you how much these were one offs' despite the fact that many of these lasted longer than the Alexandrian-Roman era or the modern era. It’s hard not to see that as a handwave to a gaping hole in the theory. It seems like a big deal that you have centralization and decentralization in temporal and technological proximity, and it seems like eras of centralization are a lot more common than you say.
To loosely summarize: while you can point to technologies having an impact on state capacity, this theory has a tendency to reverse cause and effect. Many are as much a product of centralization (or decentralization) as a driver. Technology can allow you to exert more central control over a large territory, but centralization makes it far more viable to engage in mass infrastructure creation. Likewise, the division of history into (rare) periods of centralization and (common) periods of decentralization doesn’t match real history (a ubiquitous problem with grand theories of history), where centralizing and decentralizing trends coexist and where rapid swings between one and the other are common.
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I also find many of the historical anecdotes suspect. There are too many to address systematically (and I lack the knowledge in many cases), but I wanted to pick on one I do know something about:
Fighter Jets, nuclear submarines, and Aircraft Carriers are actually far more analogous to a knights horse and armour or castle… capital intensive expensive assets that can be operated by what are historically very small groups of people. The thing currently stopping someone like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or El Chapo from owning a Aircraft Carrier or two + airfleet, or a few Nuclear Submarines + cruise missiles, and carving out a network of private enclaves isn’t capital cost or expense (on paper any of the 3 could afford the 10-20 Billion expense + 2-5b annual cost)… It is just that the US is currently maintaining its monopoly.
This analogy doesn't make sense. (Also, you later contradict it, citing an aircraft carrier as an example of a centralizing technology)
The knight is a product of decentralization, not a driver. Heavily armored cavalry was not some post-Roman revolution in military affairs. What made the knight was the breakdown of centralized government. As I mentioned above, a weak polity with a limited state apparatus doesn't have the ability to train thousands of men or source the necessary horses and armor in order to provide for a professional corps of heavy cavalry. What they do have is a nominal claim to land, which they can parcel out to loyal followers in exchange for military service. Rather than being the sharp end of a very large centralized military, knights are mostly responsible for their own training and equipment. (Variations on this pattern of military organization are pervasive in Medieval Europe, not just for knights - it's easy on organizational overhead, but you make tradeoffs in terms of efficiency, quality, and scalability).
Jets, submarines, and aircraft carriers, on the other hand, are products of an integrated economy operating under centralized states. It is not a coincidence that only a couple of countries are capable of building these, and it’s not just about money – the Gulf States have plenty of money, but they’re still buying all of their stuff (and the specialists needed to maintain them) from the people who can actually put these systems together.
Skibboleth
6mo ago
For contempt because in part I view it as a fundamental right to be contemptuous of court
What does that mean? Contempt of court is ignoring the authority of the court. No one can stop you from doing that, but the court has to have the authority to bring you into compliance. To say that they can't do that is to, in effect, say that participation in the legal system is voluntary. Do a crime and then just say no to prosecution.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
Meanwhile, probably half of the white victims' own family will back the cops over the victim.
I think a crucial distinction between white people shot by police and black people shot by police is that a) white racial consciousness is relatively low and black racial consciousness is quite high b) white people are generally positively disposed towards the police while black people view the police quite negatively. The result is that white people don't see the police murdering a white person as an attack on white people the same way black people do and they're much more likely to accept the police's official story or write it off as an isolated incident.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
This is all 4d chess move by Musk.
It's never 4d chess.
It's his company now. If he wanted to fire everyone and bring back Dorsey as CEO he could just do that. There's no need for the Mad King routine.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
This imo underscores an important truth to the ultra principled who believe in free speech absolutism and neutral institutions, the overton window won't shift the other way just to punish the "heretics" who've assailed this sacred virtue.
Alternatively, it suggests that right wing "free speech" warriors never had a principled commitment to free speech as a value and were just angry that they were getting moderated and criticized.
Alternatively alternatively, it suggets that Elon Musk never had a principled commitment to free speech as a value and given the opportunity will punish people who criticize him.
this could just be the first legitimate W for the right.
What is a "legitimate W" and why would this be the first?
Skibboleth
4mo ago
Why are Indians so bad in India but ones that come hear and get a taste of American corporate structure so good?
Selection effects + magic dirt. Indian workers in the US are going to tend to be of a higher caliber than their counterparts that didn't emigrate, but they are also plugged into American institutions rather than Indian ones. It's hard to understate the degree to which institutional quality can impact the performance of individual workers.
The argument is that Kissinger enabled genocides/mass murders in Cambodia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, East Timor, etc... and thus bears responsibility for millions of deaths.
I'm not sure how much I buy that argument. Kissinger generally reacted to these events with callous indifference and took the position that they shouldn't affect US foreign policy (see also, his illustrative remark about Soviet Jews: "If they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern."), but that sort of indifference is pervasive in international politics and Kissinger was mostly just crass enough to be on the record saying it instead of mouthing platitudes. While it doesn't exactly speak well of his moral character, attributing responsibility to him in particular mostly seems to stem from the tendency to treat the US as the only country with agency.
his role in normalizing relations with China probably saved way more Asian lives than he killed.
Almost nobody actually thinks in these sort of brute consequentialist terms.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
If I was at a show to see a comedian and some unfunny nerd took the mike, I'd probably boo as well.
I mean, I wouldn't, I was raised to think talking in the theater would lead to immediate divine retribution, but I can easily see why someone would (especially given that comedy show audiences have a tradition of heckling if they think you're not funny).
Skibboleth
11mo ago
Merchant class aesthetics updated for the modern era. Ostentation is for the extinct warrior aristocracy or noveau riche clods with no taste. Pursuit of beauty is for the priestly class. Merchants are supposed to be frugal, modest, and vaguely sterile.
Alternatively: function over form. As others have noted, people don't spend a lot of time looking at their own house. If Gates finds the design serves his needs better, he probably doesn't care that it looks drab.
Alternatively mk 2: countersignalling. Gates is one of the richest and most successful people on the planet. He doesn't need to impress anyone.
...thinks you want to sleep with him.
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