Tollund_Man4
No bio...
User ID: 501
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
They're brilliant resources I won't disagree. But I don't think Wikipedia is good enough to do away with the need to memorise historical facts to the point where someone relying solely on it won't be severely limited.
If someone is misrepresenting history to you, you won't become aware that something is wrong in the first place unless you've got a stock of historical knowledge already built up in your mind (Wikipedia is a decent way to do this, but we're back to memorising information here).
Now you can double check everything you hear on Wikipedia, but even that labour intensive act can't help you find analogous information which won't be considered relevant enough to be included in the same Wikipedia page, but which may be very relevant to the discussion at hand.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Yeah nothing much of substance has happened yet besides the shift in tone. The only thing I can think of is that the guarantee of accommodation has been restricted to Ukrainian refugees.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
In particular in the area of information technology we don't bother remembering anything, we develop technologies like wikipedia.org and stackoverflow.com so that relevant information is easily available and retrievable by anyone. No education needed.
Are you saying that Wikipedia does away with the need to memorise information in the area of information technology or of memorising information in general? If the latter I strongly disagree.
Reminds me of the protests in Ireland. I suspect both will fail for a similar reason: street reactions to Twitter videos have clear limits of how far they can change matters. Policy is changed in the halls of power, ultimately.
The Irish government has made some gestures towards taking a tougher approach to asylum seekers, surprisingly.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar recently: "We also need to be firm with people who come to Ireland with a false story or false pretences, we need to be firm with them and say that we are going to make a quick decision on your application and we will return you to your country of origin and people expect that." Currently a final decision on an application for asylum takes years, as people can continually appeal their rejections.
The situation is particularly dire in Ireland at the moment because there is such a shortage of accommodation (for all, not just for refugees) that for a while last month new arrivals were immediately becoming homeless. While the government is happy to dismiss the protesters as far right loons, they're not as eager to be called out on human rights grounds for letting refugees sleep on the street.
Edit: There was some controversy over a recent poll which showed that 56% of Irish people answered Yes to the question 'Has Ireland taken in too many refugees?'. Given the goodwill towards Ukrainian refugees a more specific question on asylum seekers would likely show a much stronger 'Yes'.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
So there was a kind of parallel thing going on where kids who weren't even alphabetically literate in their first language were doing the ABC's in English.
Something similar goes on in Ireland where Irish class material will be so much more advanced than foreign language classes despite the fact that most people don't have it as a first or second language. Spanish class will have you learning verb conjugations while in Irish class you'll be studying poetry and reading plays. It's common to hear complaints from people saying they retained more French than Irish after leaving school.
What proportion of modern day Asian Americans are descended from the stock that lived under these laws and what proportion came after?
Wikipedia tells me that immigration picked up a lot after 1965, and pew research shows a population of only 980,000 in 1960 compared to 3.5 million in 1980, and 12 million in 2000, but I'm not American so I may be missing something obvious.
If the argument is that historical discrimination creates damaged cultures within certain races, the seemingly contradictory good behaviour of people of the same race who came after the discrimination ended isn't a refutation.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
He's a comedian first and foremost, and I think the reason he seems so hard to pin down is that he's doing more than dressing up an ideology in plausibly deniable terms.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
But we already did this experiment with the totalitarian states of the 20th century and people still thought differently even when they were force fed with their culture and media with the right way of thinking. It didn't work and it is not going to work this time either even if we have more powerful tools.
It might not have worked totally, but it worked well enough to keep the totalitarian system in place for quite a while no?
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Yeah it's a tough thing to distinguish and you may be right. What about game theoretically punishing someone out of a sense of duty without the personal aspect of revenge? Like 'there but for the grace of God go I', I'm a soldier and you're a soldier on the opposing side who I hold no personal animus towards but who I'm going to try and kill for what your country did to mine.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
The one thing I might worry about with that is that pedophiles are only using porn as a substitute for the harder to get thing that they really want, and they likely take pleasure in sharing evidence of their crime regardless of who pays for it. Flooding the market might make it harder to detect the real thing without actually dissuading pedophiles from abusing children.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Nah they're not into rap music, mostly country. Though I am shocked at how much the local Nigerians are affected by UK drill culture, kids I went to school who seemed pretty normal suddenly picking up a London accent and trying to be gangsters before ending up in jail.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
For example taking a picture from a celebrity's instagram and using AI to transform it into a high-fidelity (but technically fake) nude picture of them seems functionally the same as i.e. spying on them in the shower or when they're changing, which are actions I think we can all agree would be some form of wrong or illegal sexual violation (or perhaps we can't? you tell me).
There's a difference in that spying on people involves an intrusion into their private space and sometimes even the threat of more violent acts. It means I have some way of getting into your house, or taking control of your personal devices, or that I have snuck into changing rooms that I shouldn't be in. It's wrong because the steps to doing it in the first place are wrong and because it signals that you don't respect boundaries, your sense of security in your own home is damaged if someone does this to you.
The only instances of deepfakes being used to cause harm that I can think of involve some second step which it is much less philosophically complicated to sanction. If I want to use it to damage your reputation, well that's straightforwardly wrong, but the wrong there is in how the image was used not how it was produced. It's wrong in a simple way, the way in which painting a nude and telling your partner that you posed for it in my living room (assuming that's out of character for you) is wrong.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Is that because 'revenge' is the same as logically 'wanting to maintain incentives against intentionally doing harm to society' or are you just discounting motivation and looking at the act itself?
If it's the first I disagree with equating the two as revenge can be justified irrationally without concern for the harm to society. I might fully agree with the idea that the legal punishment for an offender is sufficient to disincentivise him and deter others from doing the harm he did again, yet still chafe against the fact that the law is holding me back from doing worse to him than prison can.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
I can vouch for the fact that is very fun, if not very safe.
Reading more about the 1916 Rising (got distracted from reading The Seven and I've just picked it back up). Seems relevant to discussions on LARPing and aiming for real change, what if you self-consciously LARP so hard it works?
Hobson had 'hot arguments' about [the planned insurrection] with Pearse, arguing that guerilla tactics had a better chance of success than gambling everything on one throw, but Pearse said what mattered was to have a sacrifice, and it had to be a sacrifice of high theatrical impact. As Conor Cruise O'Brien put it, 'What he was aiming at essentially was the staging in Dublin of a national Passion Play, but incorporating a real life-and-death blood sacrifice'.
Pearse is one of the best Irish nationalist writers, but he is also absolutely crazy. As Yeats said to Ezra Pound, "Pearse was half-cracked and wanting to be hanged. He has Emmet delusions same as other lunatics think they are Napoleon or God."
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
What does he say about the seeming counter-example of Ireland, which was both extremely Catholic and outside the Hajnal line?
I reference it in discussions or share the best excerpts with people to spark a discussion (mostly here, /r/slowhistory and /r/Irishhistory) I've burned some excerpts into my head this way because they always seem to be relevant.
If I don't know a book well yet often I'll read something online and it'll trigger an urge to scrounge through my bookshelf to find the particular book and particular page that I have a feeling says the thing I vaguely remember. Usually these are physical books but I ctrl-f'd my way through a few Hayek books once because I was certain that he had used the term 'Anglo-Saxon countries' (iirc the argument concerned the 'Anglo-Saxon traditions' in some Republican manifesto being a novel term that some thought was a dogwhistle).
Ideally I'd write proper reviews of each book and discuss them online, but I haven't developed the ability to regularly produce those yet.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Irish people can tell pretty reliably by dress, accent, demeanour etc, and if you've lived somewhere for a while you'll get to know what the local families look like. Though illegal there's fairly universal discrimination against them in pubs, hotels, restaurants and the like. You can make decent money allowing a good traveller family to become regulars at your pub, that is until their cousins arrive..
Police and bouncers might give you some hassle for sharing a surname with a local traveller family, but there's so much overlap with normal Irish surnames (e.g Joyce, Barret, McDonagh) that it's only a useful clue in the context of other things. A friend of mine once got arrested after being jumped for answering yes when asked "are you one of the McDonaghs?" (ironically there's a good chance one of the McDonaghs was involved in jumping him).
But to answer your question, if a traveller drops the accent and exits the culture they can become indistinguishable from any other Irish person. I've got a programmer friend like that who lives abroad now.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
I had Vanced for a while but it stopped working for me a few months back, might look into setting it up again.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
That works too.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
That works.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Is there any way to keep YouTube videos playing when I lock my phone without paying for premium?
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
Your counter-examples are all cultural figures, which are also not representative of normal society.
Tollund_Man4
3yr ago
This situation is literally unprecedented. There has never been a major proxy war with a nuclear superpower fought right on its border.
The Soviet Union bordered Afghanistan, though that was a much smaller war.
This looks like an inversion of complaints leftists make about benign looking statements which normalise cis/heteronormative/patriarchal/religious/reactionary worldviews etc.
It is very easy to make people look ridiculous when they make complaints about this stuff, and yet they win eventually. Each time it happens supporters and detractors will come out of the woodwork and just shout at each other unproductively, so I'm guessing that the value is more in testing the waters and counting allies, like raising a flag, and then using this info to guide moderator decisions.
So It doesn't look to me like there's anything productive to gain from fighting here, the battles that determine the outcome of these battles are elsewhere.
More options
Context Copy link