Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
The reasons for why civil rights legislation, including affirmative action, have been enacted and are maintained in the US have at least at much to do with external as with internal policy. The original context for the enactment of the CRA and all the legislation meant to make racial equality not just a theory but an actuality was America's ideological content with the Soviet Union, a country that could lay a credible claim to an antiracist practice that made it very attractive to Third World masses and First World intellectuals; since it was also known that the equitable treatment of African-Americans was one of the main areas where United States had, to put it mildly, failed, it was also imperative for the US to show that it was working to fix it.
The status of the African-Americans was closely followed by numerous anti-colonialist and other progressive movements abroad, after all, and the civil rights movement was genuinely aspirational to numerous such movements. This was recognized by many prominent African-American figures, from DuBois to King to the Black Panthers, who all utilized this knowledge in their own ways. Some time ago I read a book of MLK's speeches, and MLK frequently appealed to the idea that unless America can show it offers equal treatment to AAs, it's going to lose the battle for hearts and minds in the wider global context.
Of course, the Soviet Union no longer exists, but America is still getting the dividends for this policy; however much anti-Americanism might exist abroad, there could still be vastly more, and, for instance, America (at least in 2015) was viewed very favorably particularly in Africa, doubtless aided by that implicit group of American cultural ambassadors - African-American celebrities showing that the American model can offer fabulous opportunities for wealth and influence for black people, too.
The one group of conservatives who seem to see this connection are the isolationists, but I'm not quite sure even they would be fully prepared for what would happen if America, implicitly or explicitly, just went "Okay, all that is over now, our policy is now based on the idea that blacks are morons and will never, as a group, reach the status of the whites (or Asians)", and then seeing that message percolate out abroad. It would have just effortlessly handled out a huge trump card both to China, always looking for opportunities to expand its influence, and whatever radical anti-American movements there are, from Chavists to parties like EFF in South Africa to radical Islamists (who surely would be willing to say that there's no racial discrimination in an Islam, whether that's true or not).
Once those movements start taking over their countries with no effective American counter apart from war (which the isolationists would presumably also oppose), and once that starts effecting the global trade (and the Houthis have just shown you don't even need to take over to do that), the American economy will take in the lumps, too - and there might be even more direct effects of the terrorist kind that one might surely imagine. Is it worth all that to just abolish affirmative action? Perhaps to some, surely not to many others.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
Just as an aside, what value I continue to see in this forum is that it offers at least some sort of a dispassionate ground to discuss the tactical and strategic aspects of a conflict like this, which I find far more interesting than endless decriminations over modern dating or trans stuff or whatever. Twitter, certainly, is currently almost unusable for a discussion like this, even the local Twitter (in a country where the I/P conflict has far less valence than in many other European countries).
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2yr ago
What keeps going through my mind, apart from worrying how this will end and what the geopolitical implications are, of course, is how embarrassing it would be a Russia Stronk shill type right now. No matter how this ends, this sort of shit does not actually happen in nations that are actually stronk.
I repeat myself from previous threads, but a continuous talking point for Z patriots and their scarce American/Western hype men has been that Ukraine is embarrassing, cringe, Reddit etc. "fake nation", unlike Russia with its 1000 years of history and a populace willing to give their lives for the Motherland. It certainly, once again, seems that Ukraine is dozens of times more "real" than Russia, in the sense that Ukrainians have (after 2022, at least) been relatively able to keep an united patriotic front instead of tearing each other apart in a madcap struggle for power.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2yr ago
My general feel is that, when the protests were taking place, the Western governments were already hard in the process of considering how to gradually start ramping down the unworkable lockdown/mandate/fear cycle that had characterized the Covid response. The most visible parts of the Covid response were generally wound down everywhere at roughly the same time, ie, Jan-Feb 2022. Of course at the same time Ukraine also started to gain more and more importance as an issue in the eyes of the political class, even before the invasion itself.
As such, I'm not sure if the Freedom Convoy propagated these processes or simply came at a time when the consensus had started to form that these things should be wound anyway. It might have even delayed the process (in Canada, at least) by making it an issue of maintaining face for Trudeau.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2yr ago
There was a similar small to-do in Finland about a planned screening of the Drag Kids documentary. It was basically stillborn since the cultural festival that had planned the screening quickly withdrew it from lists, citing threats sent. However, while the fracas was going on, much of the discussion basically consisted of both sides flinging "You're just importing American culture wars!" accusations to each other; pro-LGBTQ types saying that this is a copy of American conservatives tactically making up mountains from molehills over LGBTQ culture and conservatives retorting that the whole "drag kids" thing is just an American folly to begin with (even though the documentary appears to be Canadian, but that's not exactly a large difference from this side of the pond anyway).
Of course they're both correct, but it's like... of course this country is going to import culture, discussions and ideologies wholesale from some other country, in this case the most powerful country in the world, the undisputed global hegemon, with never-seen-before opportunities to broadcast its ideologies at scale everywhere. What else are we supposed to do, invent all the local ideologies and policy points ourselves? There's just 5,5 million of us.
The entire Finnish history consists of people importing ideologies from elsewhere. Christianity through Sweden and Russia, later Lutheranism from Germany, then nationalism from Germany (the founding father of Finnishness, J. V. Snellman, basically based his nationalist visions on Hegelianism), socialism from Germany, environmentalism from, yes, Germany... When one reads Social Democratic magazines from the start of the century they're already bashing each over basically over whether German Socialist 1 or German Socialist 2 was correct, and adjusting their own views on the basis of such debates elsewhere.
The biggest difference to past centuries is where the importation of ideology comes from, but that it's mostly imported from somewhere says.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2yr ago
Did socialism just suck away anarchism’s energy by speaking to the same people disaffected by capitalism but offering a more compelling vision of society?
I'd say that, even moreso, Bolshevism and the post-Bolshevist Communist movement did this. The Bolsheviks had an extremely compelling argument for everyone that was dreaming of a society with capitalism overturned: "Look, we did it!" Compared to it, anarchists looked like unserious daydreamers.
Of course, Bolsheviks also quite literally bodied anarchists in several territories, like in Russian-Revolution-era Ukraine and Spanish Civil War, but even there, even the fact that they managed to do this served as an argument for them. The Communist Parties offered a militant, regimented organization that could basically be turned into an army that asserted its will on the society as the need be. Such organizations - communist, fascist, whatever - beat the inchoate, loose anarchist structures every time these two encounter each other in the field of ideological or actual battle.
Of course, when the Bolshevik-style Communism then ended up being a spent force, the general revolutionary energy dissipated. "It's easier to envision the end of the world than the end of capitalism" and all that. Whatever existing anarchist organizing there is is more of the "try to create an alternative society in the cracks of the existing system without directly fighting against the system too much" variety, but that sort of thing still tends to either get crushed (if they can't manage to avoid fighting the system too much) or recuperated (if they don't fight the system at all, or only in a perfunctory way) by the system.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2yr ago
The EU has a bureaucracy that makes no bones about openly pushing for the "ever closer Union", ie. federalization of EU; that is the true ideological quest of the Eurocrats, not identity-politics or left-of-center politics as such. The federalization project has tended to be evolve at a snail's pace, though. We'll see if the coming years speed it up.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2yr ago
My wife just gave birth to a healthy baby boy yesterday. This is our second child, we also have a 2,5-year-old daughter.
How many other people here have children? If I remember past surveys of SSC and the SSC extended universe forums (ie. /r/themotte etc.), actually being a parent doesn't seem to be that common.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4mo ago
Since he has already made not wearing a suit his "thing", it would have also been a signal for him to wear a suit. It would have probably signified a humiliation and subjection, a kowtow to the new Emperor.
I'm thinking of another leader who made disrespecting sartorial codes his "thing", the Greek PM Tsipras during the euro crisis, who made a point of not wearing a tie until there was a debt deal. Of course, when the debt deal was made, it was basically the same old austerity he had been elected to end, and when he wore a tie it was obviously an indication of submission (though the actual submission had been made far earlier).
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
What this really just reminds me of is that we really are, de facto, still living in the greatest time of free speech and free exchange of ideas ever. One could make a list of obscure and out-of-prints books like this with the expectation that someone who desires will find at least the great majority of these books with a bit of searching and an ability to look into the right places (like the Internet Archive for the older ones); in the pre-Internet times, even knowing about this stuff would require a huge physical effort. Sure, some of the books might get one punished for mere ownership in certain places, but I would guess that even in those cases the authorities finding out would require you committing some other crime of sufficient valence to get your hard drive examined, so the punishment for owning the PDF would be extra punishment on top of the one you'd get for committing a more concrete variety of a crime.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
even though under most reasonable cases they would be better off if they just accepted the Israelis as their superiors and started living like your median Israeli Arab.
But Israel isn't offering them that option! Israel isn't offering them the option of "living like your median Israeli Arab", since it isn't offering them the option to be Israeli Arabs, ie. become citizens of Israel, even implicitly second-class ones like the Israeli Arabs! All that Israel has been offering them, currently, until this operation, has been the continuation of the same as now, ie. continuous humiliation of checkpoints and raids and continous expansion of settlements in the West Bank and the state of siege and isolation in Gaza; there has been no indication of this changing under whatever possible Israeli administration, and no particular reason to suspect that even if Palestinians dropped militancy entirely that this would change.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2yr ago
This continues to be in the same category of data as almost all ufology evidence: a guy says a thing, with apparently nothing concrete to show for it.
Maybe he’s a fabulist, or mixing up info from some terrestrial sources project - by American or other government - with the massive amounts of UFO lore swirling about in America, even in the highest circles. Maybe he’s engaging in some spook project, like what I theoretized about here.
Without anything more concrete to show for it than in previous ’high-level whistleblower’ cases, little need to adjust priors.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2yr ago
"I done two tours of duty in I-i-ran,
I came home with a brand new plan,
I buy GPUs from Mexico,
build a data center down Copperhead Road..."
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2yr ago
Like I've indicated, I work in a field - translation - where machine learning applications have already been commonplace for over a decade, seeing the development of machine translation from substandard early Google Translate effort that many people still associate with machine translation with the sophisticated effort put in by DeepL and other such engines. (ChatGPT also produces an OK effort, but as recounted here, still makes some more obvious mistakes than DeepL, at least when translating to Finnish.)
Furthermore, translation is a classic example of a field where overtly enthusiastic tech types have been predicting "human worker replacement by machine" for ages and ages now. An anecdote I often recount is when, during student days, I had been drinking with a friend who also studied translation and we went to a pizza place at the end of the night. We were accosted by a drunken engineer who started explaining how translation is a dead-end field and machines are going to replace translators any day now. I replied that when there's going to be a machine to replace the translators, it's also going to replace the engineers, and he got quiet and left. (At this moment, I wouldn't be surprised if the engineers weren't replaced before the translators.)
How has machine learning affected my workload? Well, the amount of money I've been making has if anything increased during the recent years, though this is also probably natural career development (and also a necessity to answer the rising inflation). For a long time, fair amount of my work has been checking and editing machine translation, a job that is common enough to just generally be referred by an acronym in the field (MTPE, Machine Translation Post-Editing). At the same time, I'm still able to charge 2/3 of my usual word-based rate for MTPE, evidence that there's still a lot of work to be done to not only fix the various errors that even advanced models make but get the "smell of machine translation" off the text.
Obviously, this is an issue of margins. While a lot of text is translated from one language to another, vastly greater amounts of texts getting produced right now aren't, including in commercial applications. Translator workloads getting lighter and translation getting cheaper has thus far just meant that more and more texts get translated now than previously. We'll see if the wall hits at some point.
Like I've also recounted previously, during the past few years I have, if anything, got less MTPE than previously, even though machine translation has improved. This is partly just random chance (ie. I've worked in projects which just aren't that suitable for modern MT applications) but also because some customers explicitly forbid translators from using MT, presumably because end-client companies are afraid that some trade secrets end up in Google's files. Of course I can't be sure they have means to actually check if I use MT if I just edit it good enough, but I can't not be sure of that, either, and getting caught for something like this would be a good way to lose a regular client.
From what I've learned, the biggest game changer in the field - from the point of view of a working translator - was when electronic communication enabled the translation from regular in-company jobs to enterpreneuer-based freelancing. This was actually going on while I was at the university - the teachers still mentioned in-company jobs as something to strive for, but often acknowledged they probably wouldn't be forthcoming and this would (negatively) affect pay for translators. Furthermore, even before machine translation, as such, got common, there have been the so-called translation memory programs, fairly simple tools that mostly replicate existing translations to new ones, and have done their share in making translation faster. Even in white-collar fields, the automation of gruntwork is hardly a new concept.
Of course we'll have to see in the coming years how, exactly, LLM's affect this field. One particular potential field for advancement would be when we get models that can, with some reliability, provess image, audio and text at the same time, since this might have a considerable effect on subtitling (or dubbing, but that is pretty rare in Finland, outside of children's programs). On the other hand, I work in a co-operative office and regularly chat with another translator who basically does not do MTPE at all, rarely uses MT in general and is generally not particularly aware of the developments in the machine-learning field. She seems to get by quite fine, nevertheless.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2yr ago
Well, one of the reasons might indeed be that there were considerable advantages for Ukraine for holding Mariupol: it kept Russian troops tied and away from the Donetsk front at a crucial time, and the bravery of the troops at Mariupol also served as an obvious inspiration at a dark period for Ukraine and offered propagandistic material, both internally and externally. This holding action got Ukraine through to the period in the summer when Western aid started showing up and making some difference.
More to the point, though... maybe it is true, the Russians really just don't have the sufficient spirit to do it?
Throughout the war, the pro-Russian side on the Internet has banged the drum about how Ukraine (as an entity separate from the Russian world) is FAKE FAKE FAKE, an invention of the Austrians and Poles and Germans, imagination of the exile communities, forcibly maintained by Nazi Banderites, an unsustainable made-up chimera, a "Reddit-ass country", "fighting for globohomo and Pride parades", a number of similar claims intended to bolster the idea that at any moment everything would just break and Russians would be received as liberators in the end and so on. Meanwhile, of course, Russia is a real country, the realest there is, and Russians would of course fight for it in the same way as in 1941 and would gladly just rather die in a nuclear hellfire than lose.
Well, the proof of the pudding etc., and the taste of the pudding would now seem to indicate that Ukrainians, individual cases indicating otherwise aside, are truly fighting like hell for their invented made-up Reddit Nazi globohomo country, while russians, individual cases indicating otherwise, are losing whatever spirit they might have had at some point, as indicated, for instance, the massive waves of exiles leaving the country at whatever indication there has been that they might be conscripted and have to fight.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2yr ago
This just has the same affect as all the previous similar pro-Russian predictions and accountings I've read. Always the same terse, affected style, supposed to convey an image of brute realism (very unlike those pro-Ukrainians who are so soyjack and Reddit in their childish enthusiasm and with their memes! Adults speaking here!)... and that realism always ends up being that this time Russians are just on the cusp of total victory and destruction of the Ukrainian army.
The fact that pro-Russian sources have been making similar prognosis for the entirety of the war is not mentioned, or if it is, it's excused as merely a result of Western support and "mercenaries" (we're just going to use that word to describe all volunteer foreign or returnee troops in a conflict from here on, aren't we?) or by Russia holding itself back from sheer kindness or incompetence... and now all that is ending, and the inevitable victory is on the way, and in a few months we'll lather, rinse, repeat. Of course pro-Ukrainian sources do the same - the ever-starting Kherson offensive and so on.
Of course it's always possible that Russians will eventually win, even in the coming months, wars often hinge on factors not currently visible, but this analysis doesn't really offer anything that hasn't been seen before or would convince me it's more than usual pro-Russia boosterism. Why feature it at all?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2yr ago
I'm not saying anything more than we know about the facts of the case, but I continue to be flabbergasted by the way the "look at how weird this guy is, he could possibly not be a far-righter!" argument is used! It's perfectly plausible these days (typical? No, but plausible) that one might have a guy going from hippie new age Green Party type to far-right within a short period - I've witnessed numerous similar types doing the same thing because of Covid here in Finland, and there's an entire microparty - "Kristallipuolue", "Crystal Party" - which consists of alternative medicine / new age hippie types who went hardcore antivaxx and anti-measures during the pandemic, started picking up things like anti-immigration thought, and are now in an electoral alliance with a couple of far right parties.
The pipelines from new age to right-wing are often quite clear. Left-wing conspiracy theory gives way to right-wing conspiracy thinking (QAnon and so on). Localist preference to local products can be expanded to general anti-internationalist thinking (opposition to UN and EU, and so on). "Get your vaccines out of my body!" is expanded to more generic libertarianish thinking. "Male and female energies" earth-mother-type thinking can become advocation for traditional gender roles. And so on.
There are plenty of right-wingers who are generally able to conceptualize the fact that left-wingers can take sharp turns to the right, even suddenly, who have done the same themselves, but who then instantly start feigning ignorance of such potential mechanisms when it looks like one of those recent converts might have done something, you know, crazy. Something with bad optics. Then you can only be counted among the right wing if you've been a stable and solid normie law-abiding middle-class whitebread person for your entire life.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2yr ago
Well, for one thing, right from the "concentric circle 2", I quite wonder why I am supposed to sympathize with white nationalism at all, considering the stakes, if I'm not firmly within the circle 1, "whites in every situation".
More to the point, though, these sort of of ponderings demonstrate, more than anything else, that race is indeed socially constructed, at least in large part and perhaps the most important part. If one was to consider human race on a firmly biological basis, it would probably be based on human genetic clustering studies like the one which procuded this image, I'm pretty sure everyone here has seen it. Yet, those clustering studies tend to demonstrate that Europeans and Middle Easterners are indeed closely very genetically related compared to other major continental subpopulations (and what else would you use as a comparison); of course you could divide those clusters to more and more groups to get the result where Europeans and Middle Easterners show more as distinct populations, but at some point it just becomes p-hacking. If we consider Europeans and Middle Easterners as a part of the same population, then surely ethnic Jews, who tend to in roughly 50 % European and 50 % Middle Easterners, are very firmly a part of that cluster.
And yet white nationalists tend to talk about Jews as wholly and unambiguously nonwhite and the migration of Syrians, Turks and Algerians as race replacement. This is one mystery that I've never quite seen firmly answered. Of course one might say that they are not white-white because they are Jewish and Muslim and so on, or because they don't identify as white themselves, but then you just prove more firmly the (partially, and perhaps the most importantly) socially constructed basis of race.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2yr ago
Yes, we (or at least people who have followed Ukrainian affairs for some time) know about Zelensky's status as a comedian, or connections to Kolomoisky, or corruption, or whatever. The whole point of the post you were replying to was that he's an unlikely hero due to that stuff! It's not a debunking to post the same stuff that essentially forms the crux of the argument!
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8mo ago
Hamas calls for end to war
Putin ready to end Ukraine war
China wants to work peacefully with us
These have made occasional suggestions of such nature for years now.
EU will buy U.S. gas not Russian gas
EU already buys a lot of US gas (19,4 % of all EU gas, according to this). https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/eu-gas-supply/
Zelenskyy phones Trump & Elon
All world leaders of note will congratulate whatever US president gets elected and will try to communicate with him as a matter of course. Harris would haev been no different. The only notable thing is Elon's participation in the call.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
This is, incidentally, why Covid-era anti-vaccine activism was incomprehensible to a lot of boomers and the natural reaction was that stragglers were crazy and should probably be forcibly vaccinated. When the struggle had been getting enough vaccinations to cover even the poorer areas in various countries, hearing that scientists had cooked up an extra sciencey vaccine with a brand new mechanism was not a cause for concern but for joy and extra trust.
Same attitude applies to other topics - I once listened to an old local leftist lady recount how left-wingers of her generation couldn't quite always understand why the younger generation campaigned for more veggie food days for school meals, since her generation had campaigned for more days when meat was served in school meals, as one way to distribute the rising wealth.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
Muslim terminology is becoming popular online — I have seen cases of Muslim expressions like inshallah and mashallah entering terminally online lexicon (which is the first step to normie lexicon).
"The normalization of cyka blyat in terminally online lexicon - the first step towards Russianification of the Western mind"?
There's been decades of predictions about the weak secularized West falling prey to the Islamic influence ("strong horse defeats the weak horse"), and it never seems to materialize. The converts are the same as always - some (mostly women) converting for their spouse (and I rather believe that people tend to overestimate the number of such converts since they see white or light-skinned immigrant Muslims and confuse them for converted Western women), a smattering of criminals, a few "religious travelers" who might soon travel right out of their Islamic waystation after travelling in. It still is considerably more common for people wanting a "strong religion" to choose another variety of Christianity - say, Orthodoxy or Pentecostalism - from their usual one.
Meanwhile, at least this Substack article presented many strong arguments for Muslim integration (really secularization) continuing in France. Of course that can't be generalized, since France puts a specific attention on laïcité, and really all such statistics not only differ considerably country to country but also immigrant group to immigrant group.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
OpenAI announces leadership transition
The board of directors of OpenAI, Inc., the 501(c)(3) that acts as the overall governing body for all OpenAI activities, today announced that Sam Altman will depart as CEO and leave the board of directors. Mira Murati, the company’s chief technology officer, will serve as interim CEO, effective immediately.
A member of OpenAI’s leadership team for five years, Mira has played a critical role in OpenAI’s evolution into a global AI leader. She brings a unique skill set, understanding of the company’s values, operations, and business, and already leads the company’s research, product, and safety functions. Given her long tenure and close engagement with all aspects of the company, including her experience in AI governance and policy, the board believes she is uniquely qualified for the role and anticipates a seamless transition while it conducts a formal search for a permanent CEO.
Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.
In a statement, the board of directors said: “OpenAI was deliberately structured to advance our mission: to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all humanity. The board remains fully committed to serving this mission. We are grateful for Sam’s many contributions to the founding and growth of OpenAI. At the same time, we believe new leadership is necessary as we move forward. As the leader of the company’s research, product, and safety functions, Mira is exceptionally qualified to step into the role of interim CEO. We have the utmost confidence in her ability to lead OpenAI during this transition period.”
I posted this in Twitter and someone speculated that it's because Altman paused subscriptions on Tuesday, but that would alone seem like a pretty inconsequential reason for this sort of a major move.
The most famous woman in the history of the world would be Virgin Mary, I believe.
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