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Southkraut

Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.

6 followers   follows 5 users  
joined 2022 September 04 19:07:27 UTC

"Behind our efforts, let there be found our efforts."


				
User ID: 83


				
				
				

			

		

	














	


		


			



	

		

			

			

				

					

						

							
						

						

							
							

								
Southkraut


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.

				
				
				

				

					6 followers  

					follows 5 users  

					joined 2022 September 04 19:07:27 UTC
				


				
					

					
"Behind our efforts, let there be found our efforts."



				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
User ID: 83


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Worked as intended, then.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for May 2, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I have not. Will take a note to do so.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The username was fairly damning and I don't disagree with the ban on that basis, but was the post in itself objectionable?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for May 2, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
https://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/1903340/


A French JRPG with French themes made by French Frenchmen from France. I find the premise strangely appealing, ridiculous as it seems when spelled out. I saw the prologue (in French, obivously) and thought "damn, I want to know how it continues". Notably though, the setting and plot are pretty much all I'm interested in. I can't stand JRPGs for the gameplay. Not sure if I want to get into those weeds. Weebs. Weebweeds. That said, this would be just the thing for reactivating my French in anticipation of a visitor I'll host later this Month. But at 30-45€ (depending on where I might get it from), the price is pretty steep. Believe it or not, but I pretty much learned fluent French by playing fully voice-acted text-heavy games in French, many years ago.


The premise, by the way, is that the world has ended 67 years ago, all that's left is a slice of Paris stuck in an ocean, and since then the maximum age for humans has been lowered by one year every year, it's now the year 33, everyone's and the end of their rope one way or another, expeditions have been sent out yearly to try and remedy the situation but so far none have achieved anything. Hence Expedition 33, staffed primarily with 33-year-olds who donate the last year of their lives to giving humanity (or Parisians, anyways) a fighting chance at survival.


It's moving stuff. The game starts of with the festival of erasure, where everyone says goodbye to the 34-year-olds, last gifts are exhanged, some drink, some fuck, some hide, and then all gather to observe as the maximum age gets lowered and their friends, mothers, ex-girlfriends, fathers, brothers, and possibly themselves die on the spot. Newly-made orphans are escorted to orphanages, life continues, at least for the time being.


Above all, it's French. And since I can't stand French filmmaking, French gaming is pretty much the only media I sometimes enjoy in which I can hear French people talk. I'm still debating whether or not that's worth playing a JRPG for, though.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


This is exemplified in their treatment of WW2, where much of the country prefers to ignore it in stark contrast to other Axis powers like Germany




I assure you that out of two extremes, the Japanese have chose the healthier way of dealing with it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Pyscho-Pass S01E01 - S01E03: The Social Credit System
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Given all the positive reviews here, I decided to watch an episode a day and...I quit. It's not an uninteresting concept, especially since we get the perspective of law enforcement of a totalitarian society instead of the usual "scrappy underdogs dismantle the system in a day and a half" or "observe, in first person, the bootheel coming down on the protagonist's face, until death" stories. It seemed very similar to Ghost in the Shell, in that way. But overall, above everything else, it's still just generic anime, bursting at the seams with tropes, the path so well-trod it's by now below sea level for me.


Not nearly good enough to be worth the time.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I recently dined together with a bunch of old sports buddies, and it was...karmic, I suppose, for an ex-leftist myself, to be surrounded by a bunch of people who all share the same kind of rabid, unquestioning and almost militant casual leftism and discuss it around you under the assumption that nobody they associate with could ever be of a conflicting opinion. I agreed with what I could bring myself to agree with, politely disagreed on a few details here and there, and overall accepted that this was not the venue to start any kind of adversarial debate. It was, in the end, just people coming together over shared views. But it saddened me that we, having known each other for years and getting along great in general, were not above using politics to delineate ingroup/outgroup in a nominally apolitical gathering of friends and fellow sports enjoyers. It saddened me that, no matter how much I value these friendships and prize them far above each one's views and opinions, the sentiment would hardly be reciprocated if I "revealed my power level", so to speak.


Sucks to suck, I guess. Anyone who seriously wants to be a social creature must go with the flow, obviously.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This topic interests me greatly, but I doubt I have much to add.


I'm someone who seek outs kind environments. I come from a small village where everyone knew everyone, lived in a nearby small town where people are already almost entirely anonymous to each other, spent a few years in a much larger town in which I was pretty much a rootless atomized cosmopolitan when not on campus or at work, and eventually returned home to the village. My wife would like for us to move to her home village, but it's 10x the size of mine and people there are already much more closed-off than here. I now work at the largest company in the region (thousands of employees), and it has an aggressively kind culture in which you are required to use familiar second-person pronouns (a language feature comparable to calling someone by their first name in English) and everyone, without exception, greets everyone else.


So here are some random thoughts I take away from all that:


    

  • Even in the big-town apartment block, you can socialize and form fragile, tenuous but productive bonds with people you see semi-regularly. Immediate neighbors, gas station attendants, that guy you regularly see in the elevator, the fruit seller at his market stand, roommates of course. It takes effort and isn't as rewarding as in less urban settings, but it's still better than giving up and retrating into the mode of "cool guy who never interacts with anyone".
    • 

  • Socializing in the tiny village is so easy it does itself. Take the kid to the playground, meet other parents, bam. Walk out the door, greet your neighbor, have a chat. Go to the festival. Go to church. Work your garden. Talk to the neighbor. Fiddle with your car or bike, someone will come over and ask what you're up to and whether you need any help.
    • 

  • I have the social skills and graces you'd expect from an autistic German software engineer, but I do make every effort to be polite if not friendly with everyone I meet regardless of the setting. I feel it pays off immensely - for any one person who's put off by the directness or lack of isolation, there are at least two others who are glad to be able to skip the whole "let us dance around each other so that our bubbles may never intersect" anti-social game.
    • 

  • True urbanites aren't human. They don't return the politest of nods, in any setting in which normal people would share their observations of the situation you can bet your balls they'll pull out their phones put on their earbuds and ignore the hell out of the world, and if you ever are forced to interact with them have fun trying to establish so much as eye contact. Young people love this lifestyle because they're all damaged beyond repair by their all-encompassing doomscrolling addictions.
    • 

  • The top-down imposition of kind norms at the company I work at seems to have worked. There are some holdouts who refuse to use the familiar address with the top brass, and I can understand that it may feel forced if you've been used to the previous culture for decades, but overall it has a very open and humane atmosphere and I had no trouble assimilating within mere weeks.
    • 

  • Foreigners suck. The more foreigners there are in the area, the worse the norms get. Having a Pole, a Balkanian, a Russian, an Ukrainian, an Italian and a Frisian in the village is harmless. I wager we might even be able to absorb an additional Turk and perhaps something more exotic. This does not disturb social cohesion very much, because even if those people arrived relatively recently and aren't as deeply rooted here and still maintain connections to their countries of origin, you can at least seamlessly integrate them into the daily goings-on so long as they speak the language. But as soon as there are two foreign families of the same ethnic background, you've lost. It's over. They are now their own parallel community, will maintain their separate identity, will raise their children to speak their language, and will strongly prefer interacting with each other over interacting with the natives. Scale it up, see even just the larger villages with their Russian or Turkish enclaves, look at the towns with their Muslim quarters and nascent African ghettoes, and see how young people gravitate towards "migrantisch" culture once the Leitkultur is no more, and you can tell what the future looks like. The future is someone with sunglasses on, headphones over their ears and a smartphone in his hand, walking past everyone he meets in the street, forever.
    • 



Okay, so now let's speculate.


Can you engineer people to be more kind? I'd say yes, but there are some conditions that must be met and doing so may be very difficult.


    

  • You need a high level of preexisting social trust. I'm not sure whether this can be synthesized.
    • 

  • You need a high level of ethnic homogeneity, or else you just get parallel societies.
    • 

  • The social norms czar needs sufficient authority to order everyone to maintain eye contact, greet each other, use familiar forms of address and mandate other forms of highly accessible social interaction.
    • 

  • Profit. Everyone sees their quality of life skyrocket as a consequence.
    • 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Tinker Tuesday for April 29, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I had a bit of a week.


The marriage breaking up and coming back together in the space of twelve hours, deciding on a new Kindergarten and then putting that at doubt again, trying to polish up my rusty French because I'll have a visitor soon, having 13 hours of meetings in the space of two work-days, realizing that I optimized my work-code prematurely and its performance is far in excess of what justifies the complexities introduced by my optimization measures, going to a two-day HEMA event including a tournament and realizing that I still love fighting no matter how rarely I get to do it, finding out that being hungover and dead tired can be fixed by running into an old friend and starting a spontaneous grappling match as if the last five years hadn't happened (though I almost puked my guts out by the end of it), hearing that my old fencing club was in dire straits for lack of instructors so I went and tried to badger a friend into stepping up and assuming that responsibility only for him to volunteer me as if I were still active and us finding a compromise in which we would both volunteer only to find out the next day that in fact the previous instructors had no plans of stepping down and it was all a big misunderstanding, then an "awareness" training session that everyone assumed was about wokeness but that actually was about preventing sexual abuse of minors and anyways attendance qualifies me to organize club events so that I can host weekend fencing sessions that don't require me to finagle the 4-hour drive into my work-week, I signed up for another tournament at the end of May, discovered that my historical peak HEMA ranking was actually a lot higher than I assumed (in the top 600s worldwide, at a time when I was decidedly not fencing, which shows merely that lockdowns screwed everyone over and that those rankings are worthless) and then hayfever season started and I bittersweetly discovered that levociterizine works but also pretty much knocks me out for a few hours.


Right now I'm tinkering on how to handle the aforementioned weekend fencing sessions. Can't be too often because I need to keep an eye on the homefront, so it'll be at most monthly, perhaps rather quarterly. I have no idea who would even show up on weekends, so I don't know whether to just provide a time and space for free fencing or a more structured event. I'm no didact, so even with structure it would be simple: Some medium-intensity warm-up, maybe half an hour of non-technical exercises, and then proceed to sparring. Events with low attendance risk degenerating into chatty layabout sessions, and I'd hate to sacrifice half a day just to babysit a bunch of people sitting around and shooting the shit, so maybe some structure might be good. But seeing as I'm neither an instructor nor otherwise very respectable, I might not have the authority to motivate people to exert themselves, so having a pre-defined program might help. But again, with too few people it'd be no good. There's also the issue of novices: If I invite everyone regardless of experience and equipment, then any commmunal exercises need to be feasible for those with less experience and protective equipment. If I restrict it to those with a little more experience, there's a higher risk of not enough people showing up. There's also the question of when - I favor a Saturday morning time-slot, maybe 9 to 12. That puts it two days away from Thursday and Monday practice, and people can still go about the majority of their weekend without needing to cut it up too badly. But maybe I'm overlooking something here. Another issue my own frankly atrocious state of fitness; I probably won't be able to motivate people very much if my pitch is "do as I say, not as I fail to do", so it may be advisable to look for a date at which at least one other very motivated fencer is available to pick up the slack. But first of all I suppose I need to either talk to the club leadership or join one of the organisatonal sessions to hash out the parameters and procedures to organize the event. Step number one to increase my visibility and modest respectability is to show up tomorrow for the big tournament the club organizes and help out as much as I can.


I love May. What a beautiful month. Warm as summer on a good day, everything's green and in bloom, bright, so very bright.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Terraforming being "almost" within reach is quite some statement. We can't even terraform Earth beyond very slightly changing the composition of a preexisting atmosphere under ideal planetological and logistical conditions. But we're almost ready to go creating and maintaining a human-breathable atmosphere and temperature and radiation levels on a deep-frozen desert like Mars, a tiny pebble like the Moon or a comically uninhabitable hellhole like Venus? Using chemical rocketry that barely makes it viable to put communications sattelites into low Earth orbit and can sling tiny little probes to other planets for mere billions apiece?


Space colonization will be done, if at all, in sealed habitats. Terraforming is wishful thinking.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


My point at this point, which I think is quite clear, is that ownership is essentially and definitionally the right to deprive others. That's it. I don't like that. In fact, I detest it with passion and rage. I hate it. So, I want an alternative.




This is ass-backwards.


The definition your chatbot put out may serve your position, but it's clearly not standard and obviously not how ownership normally works. Which is this: Ownership is the right to not be deprived. I.e., the opposite of what you posit.


Do I deprive you of my car? Does my mother-in-law deprive you of the vegetables she grows in her garden? Does my landlord deprive me of the apartment I rent? Do I deprive my employer of the wages I earn? Does a customer deprive a store of the products he buys? Does a hunter-gatherer in a jungle at the other end of the world deprive me of some berries and a squirrel? Do you deprive me of the device you use to post here?


You can argue that any of those statements are true, or come up with some other semantic acrobatics, but in the end it's transparently extremely motivated reasoning.


I normally advise any would-be revolutionary to first understand why the world works the way it does before they waste everyone's time by implementing some half-cocked utopia that's made of fairy dust and ignorance. But posts like this are the opposite of understanding. It's wilful nonsense.


There can be arguments for alternate economic systems, but positing a useless definition of ownership isn't making any of them.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				What's Good Writing to You?
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Code, technical writing and prose:


    

  • Naming. Proper filenames, headlines, class/method signatures etc. are essential for being able to find the right piece of text in the first place, and for having the right idea of what to expect and how to approach it. The purpose of the document in question needs to be immediately obvious.
    • 

  • Scope. The document should contain what it needs to contain to fulfill its purpose, no more and no less. In our digital age it's trivially easy to refactor text documents and move questionably relevant content elsewhere. The shorter your text is, the easier it is to place, understand and maintain.
    • 

  • Structure. Bottom line up front. Keep together what belongs together. Make sure information that's required to understand subsequent information actually comes first. Introduce acronyms with their full name before using them in short form. Use consistent and uniform style and language throughout a document. Use appropriate hierarchical depth.
    • 



Fiction:


    

  • Don't write just to generate content. Nobody needs empty literary calories. Those who demand them anyways can be duly served by generative AI. Only write if you have a point to make, a story to tell.
    • 

  • Be aware of the language you use. Your vocabulary, style and other features of language should be chosen deliberately to suit the work, and you as the writer should be sufficiently competent in their use. Employ the chosen style consistently.
    • 

  • Do your research. Even for elements that only make brief appearances or play only tertiary roles, make sure you actually know what you describe and have more than a one-dimensional idea of it. Readers in the know about the element will appreciate not getting Gell-Manned, and if you write only for those not in the know...then why include that specific element at all? Good writers know what they're writing about.
    • 



Political manifestoes, rants, diatribes:


    

  • Don't.
    • 

  • If you already did, find the nearest dumpster.
    • 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yeah, I didn't take your post as advocating 100% surveillance helicoptering - just wanted to spell out my thoughts.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
He stopped doing his thing from ten years ago and we stopped supporting, defending and promoting him.


Calling this a betrayal seems very overdramatic.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Helicopter parenting is a practice ruinous for children and parents alike. I see it around me all the time when turbo-neurotic mothers drive themselves and everyone around them and of course their children crazy with their unchecked overdramatic fears of absolutely everything that can imaginably go wrong going wrong in every moment, every day, all life long.


OTOH, full independence for kids has another set of pitfalls. Drugs, falling in with bad crowds, neglecting school are all entirely possible and I've seen them all happen very, very often in my immediate social circles.


The better solutions, as so often, are neither 0% nor 100% surveillance/independence, and require regular reevaluation.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


he betrayed us




He did? Did he make us any promises?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Sure it's falsifiable. Just wait a few billion years and see.


I'm just an ignoramus struggling to make it from day to day. What do I know of truth or eternities.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thanks for the reminder!


I've read the article some months ago, but somehow it hasn't occurred to me yet to read the Cyropedia itself. I'll put that right. Xenophon is usually a smooth read.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Tinker Tuesday for April 22, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In between work and kid, Easter. Time flies; feels like last Tinker Tuesday was mere minutes ago. Feels like I'll drop dead, grey and all wrinkles, before I get to write another line of code in private.


Thanks for keeping it up.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Ah wait, we're truth-seeking?


In that case we're all meatbags about to be ground to dust by an uncaring universe in which all conciousness exists only for a brief flash of hospitable conditions in between eternities of lifeless desolation and oblivion.


Great, truth found, now what?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
IMO it was reasonable for people at the time to throw their lot in with the Hitlerites in order to stave off the communist takeover of Germany. It seems less reasonable to consider Hitler a model anti-communist nowadays, with the benefit of hindsight. Even entirely without going into counterfactuals, I think it unfair to condemn the Germans of the 1930s for their making a bad choice in a highly uncertain and volatile epistemic environment given insufficient information, especially since the other choice was already very visibly proven to be calamitous.


In the end, we got something that was, I would say, just about as bad as some of the worst communist regimes. I wouldn't even blame it all on Hitler himself or just the hard core of the NSDAP - it was a fast-moving and overall somewhat shitty time for making reasonable political decisions, no matter who you were.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Bipedal meatbags driven by complex neural networks in dire need of something to believe in in order for their societies to function.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yeah. My reflexively Trump-hating parents have already informed me of how inconsiderate if not monstrous it was of Vance to force a man on death's door to meet him; of how that may have been the strain that killed him.


Not that Vance or Pope make any difference in our lives here.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The council of pedantic Germans approves.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Speak for yourself. I truly do not get the visceral disgust people experience from hearing other accents or languages.




When those accents are Saxon, Bavarian, Swiss, Austrian or possibly even the rare breed known as French, fine. I can live with that.


But migrantisch pisses me off. Doubly so when ethnic Germans adopt it, but let's skip that case for now. It highlights that those people are not part of the same community but in fact either of a different parallel one or of none at all. Either way they can't be fully trusted.


And that's for accents. Foreign languages are tourists at best, but all that arabic, turkish and russian isn't tourism but a full-blown fifth column of opportunistic parasites who couldn't give less of a shit about this place if they can't even be assed to speak the local language. Trust or a feeling of community aren't even a factor at this point; this is migration warfare the way the Völkerwanderung or the colonisation of the Americas was. We may be at the turkey-eating stage right now, but if those Pilgrims don't stop speaking English soon, then I think I know where we're headed.