WestphalianPeace
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User ID: 184
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
I'd be interested to see also a list of effectively banned videos related to these books. Extremist groups often create video's arguing their worldview and these video's often veered into the mixing together seemingly unrelated ideologies. It's a combination of fascinating and hilarious. Imagine, for example, seeing a video on Northern Irish Loyalist extremism and then suddenly the video starts explaining the necessity of a Land Value Tax. Incredible.
Or if in the midst of a Kahanist speech there was some side ramble against the Israeli government because of the importance of environmental regulations on water usage for sustained economic use.
If anyone else remembers, there was a time in early ISIS when they spooked the world by virtue of having a good media game instead of Al Qaeda style grainy shaky cam in the mountains. They produced a video explaining how after ISIS will fix the economy by brining back the Gold (Dinar) Standard in resistance the Federal Reserve. It is inadvertently hilarious/voyeuristically fascinating as they go back and forth between ancient history lessons, quotes from the Quran about weights & measures, and Free State Project tier screeds against the Federal Reserve. All in English.
You can still find it on Internet Archive (views: 150) but it's otherwise effectively scrubbed from the internet.
I can't help but find such absurdities to be interesting to collect.
WestphalianPeace
10mo ago
so this is actually one of the really interesting parts of Wages of Destruction. It drives home the incredible degree to which Nazi Germany was this backwards economy pulling off a Potemkin village of industrialization. I'm recalling from memory but if i recall correctly
- an ongoing housing crisis sucking up peoples meager wages
- bizarre financialization schemes to trick people into buying vehicles they'd never get
- the inability to create a decent radio that could compete in the international market
- the average german still being so poor that their diet lacks sufficient protein
- lack of mechanization on farms
- large swaths of the economy still being literally small land owning peasant farmers
- subsequently an obsessions with land inheritance laws as early at 1933.
- price controls on both ends of the market for the purpose of political support.
- lack of enough labour for the farms requiring requisition/corvee labour/slavery
- still not enough food to create a net calorie balance
and finally not enough steel for everything. there's just not enough steel for construction, fortifications, tanks, airplanes, ships, & ammunition. Let alone the domestic economy. And so one of the central ideas in Wages of Destruction is that the Nazi state uses this scarcity of steel and turns it into a means of political control. Dolling out steel here and there to favour one industry/military faction over another.
The Nazi's take this total control and use it to focus everything into one area or another the result is visible, legible, & shocking. But it's going all out for short term sugar highs over and over again. And the underlying health of the economy is nowhere near that of the US, UK, or France. And it doesn't have the comparative scale of the capacity of the USSR.
That's a very reasonable question! The mainstream account focuses on the dangerous potential and near victory of the Nazi's. It also tends of overlook economics in favour of operational accounts of the war. With a further focus on the sexy attention getting offensives of 1939-41 (42 for some).
For reading I would combine Adam Tooze's Wages of Destruction alongside Robert Citino's "Death of the Wehrmacht". The two compliment each other quite well. Death of the Wehrmacht deals with the military from the start up to 1942. His subsequent books The Wehrmacht Retreats for 1943 and The Wehrmacht's Last Stand are also engaging and accessible for average war nerd.
If you'd prefer the cliffnotes version here are some youtube video's for each.
Tooze economics highlight the constraints the domestic economy puts on the war effort. How resource & industrial capacity constraints affected decision making. Citino's account emphasizes continuity with the old Prussia tradition and the concept of Bewegungskrieg (Maneuver Warfare) over the incoherent concept of Blitzkrieg (a journalistic invention). Citino's account also explains why Prussia developed such a tradition, namely on account of the comparative poverty of Prussia and the awful geographic situation it was placed in. To quote from the first source online i could find that summarizes it neater than I can
Frederick the Great’s Prussia was a small resource poor kingdom, surrounded by more powerful states. To survive, its army’s military culture became one based on initiative at all costs. When a Prussian commander found the enemy, he attacked. The odds faced did not matter, while other forces converged on the battle. The goal was always a quick victory because Prussia could not survive a long war. As Citino highlights, taking a pre-industrial age concept of war and applying it to a 20th Century war of material worked as long as the enemy did not have time to draw upon their resources. Once the Soviet Union and the United States were in the war, Germany was up against the world’s titans of industry, but its Army’s concept of war was still mired in an age of lesser production. German commanders did not have any other plan nor was it possible for them to distil one. The blinders of culture ruled all decision-making.
I'd ask you to consider it this way: Germany starts off by fighting a bunch of small doomed states. Victory over Greece, Yugoslavia, Poland, Denmark, Belgium, & the Netherlands are not prestigious victories. They are assumptions. However the real impressive victory is over France and while this is an accomplishment it comes from a mix of French failure and German operational art. And it's an incredible upset that shocks the world!
But it does not come from a well calibrated economic engine developed by the Nazi's which overpowers the French in an attritional warfare contrasting each countries total industrial capacity. And the moment it becomes a match up between the other real players on the world stage, the UK, US, & USSR, the Nazi war economy simply isn't capable of handling the challenge.
also here's another great video by John Parshall of Shattered Sword fame comparing the Nazi tank production economics to that of the Soviet Union.
flipping back through it there is a great slide that really highlights things. From 43 minutes in:
On paper one the Henschel production facilities should be capable of producing 240-360 units. The highest monthly production goal was 95. The highest monthy production ever achieved is 104. For the majority of the lifespan of the Tiger they were averaging 60 tanks a month. 2 tanks a day.
I would suggest that having one of your major tank facilities only able to crank out 2 tanks a day while fighting the combined industrial might of the USSR, UK, & US might not be a sign that they had the best possible economic/industrial set up before the war.
well why not? Canada is an uncountry, comprised of no one, & representing nothing.
Canadians do not even exist. There is no Canadian history and no Canadian culture. There is a Quebecois/First Nations history, and any annexation of Quebec/First Nations should be negotiated separately. But Canada is merely a term of geography in which nations reside, not a nation in itself. Not a controversial idea. The government proclaims it regularly, lest anyone look back farther than June 15th, 1964.
Maybe there was once a culture called Canada. But it's long dead now. Canada is now Terra Nullis. It's for no one and belongs to no one. So annexation is completely acceptable.
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
The vast majority of this forum is atheist/agnostic. Some are Christian. But the numbers have to be seen to be believed
Source: Tracingwoodgrains's First Annual Survey, N = 885
Agnostic: 23%
Other Atheist 13.6%
Atheist Humanist 27.8%
Atheist Antitheist 12.7%
Making the total non-believer population round nicely to 77%. A little bit more if you include those who put down things like "catholic but lazy, not really believing" or "Taoist".
A census of what percent of the US is atheistic is difficult to pinpoint. An atheistic secular Jew may decide when asked on a polling question that his religion as ethno-religion is more important then a discreet theological claim and thus when the pollster asks "what religion are you" he answers Jewish. Even though when later asked 'do you believe in a God" he responds with a clear no. So too may the no longer believing Catholic who raises their kid in the church and keeps their thoughts to themselves because their Catholicism is too intertwined with their ethnicity to be unwoven. There is no contradiction here, just note that how big or small you want atheists to appear does depend on what precisely you are asking.
But for the simple "what religion are you" question. "Atheist" got 2% in 2007 and 4% in 2023. Source: Pew Research 2023 National Public Opinion Survey
What makes this forum so outrageously non-representative compared to the US population as a whole is not only that 4% vs 77% number, but also that the First Annual Motte survey also asked "what religion were you raised in". 30% were raised broadly non-religious. Meaning the average Motteizen isn't just non-religious, they are someone who was immersed and walked away. They say there's no zealot like a convert and I think this applies just as well to deconversion.
So if this forum has 3x as many explicitly anti-theists as the atheist population of the US as a whole and population here is more atheistic by literally 15x as much then your question transforms into something a little bit different. It's not just 'why does this forum broadly...' but rather 'why is a forum of this specific belief breakdown treating religion with such respect'
And for that I return us to perhaps the source. In favor of Niceness, Community, And Civilization, by Scott Alexander
I seek out people who signal that they want to discuss things honestly and rationally. Then I try to discuss things honestly and rationally with those people. I try to concentrate as much of my social interaction there as possible.So far this project is going pretty well. My friends are nice, my romantic relationships are low-drama, my debates are productive and I am learning so, so much.
And people think “Hm, I could hang out at 4Chan and be called a ‘fag’. Or I could hang out at Slate Star Codex and discuss things rationally and learn a lot. And if I want to be allowed in, all I have to do is not be an intellectually dishonest jerk.”
And so our community grows. And all over the world, the mysterious divine forces favoring honest and kind equilibria gain a little bit more power over the mysterious divine forces favoring lying and malicious equilibria.
Andrew thinks I am trying to fight all the evils of the world, and doing so in a stupid way. But sometimes I just want to cultivate my garden.
Or as Our Own Tracingwoodgrains brought up iwhen trying to explain this place in On Mottes and Mythologies
It’s pretty simple. I remember the kid I was, born into and seriously committed to a set of beliefs that I would need to seriously examine and step away from later in life. I remember just how rare it was to have a candid, good-faith discussion with people on the other side. I remember just how damaging the Arthur Chus both in and against my community were, how much unnecessary pain they caused. And if there’s any chance in an increasingly polarized world to build a space that allows that kid to honestly discuss his most controversial, difficult opinions and get sincere engagement and pushback instead of being shut down or mocked?I will drag myself across broken glass to maintain that space, and all the Arthur Chus in the world aren’t enough to convince me otherwise.
That’s The Motte for you. It’s not perfect. It doesn’t always live up to the ideals Scott Alexander and others have championed. But it comes closer to being a working discussion ground for people who hold dramatically different beliefs than anywhere else I’ve found, and that’s just not the sort of thing you give up on.
What we've all participated in constructing here is a precious little creature. I take seriously the horrific implications of why treat them with respect at all.
The Thirty Years War became the benchmark to measure all later wars. The inhabitants of eastern France interpreted each subsequent invasion int he light of stories told about the Swedes and Croats who devastated their region in the 1630s. Soldiers fighting in the trenches along the eastern front of the First World War believed they were experiencing horrors not seen in three centuries. In his radio broadcast on 4 May 1945, Hitler's architect and armaments minister, Albert Speer, announced 'the destruction that has been inflicted on Germany can only be compared to that of the Thirty Years War. The decimation of our people through hunger and deprivation must not be allowed to reach the proportion of that epoch' For this reason, he went on, Hitler's successor, Admiral Donitz, had given the order to lay down arms. Public opinion surveys carried out in the 1960's revealed that Germans placed the Thirty Years War as their country's greatest disaster ahead of both World Wars, the Holocaust, and the Black Death. - Peter Wilson, The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy, pg 5-6
I find this forum to be a civilizational candle in the dark in these ircivilizational times. And that means taking the religious among us here seriously. If we are excessively demure to them then that is only a reason to expand that sensibility to others, not to deny them that environment in the first place. There is enough vitriol on every other website and in every other which side are you on boy shibboleth seeking interrogation-conversation. If you J'accuse this place of taking people who hold unsubstantiated beliefs ridiculed in greater rat-dom and engaging with them with seriousness of tone and tenderness of heart then I take your accusation in stride.
Yes. It is.
WestphalianPeace
10mo ago
I am not making my argument in bad faith. I stopped, considered your question and considered it legitimate. I tried to figure out which books would be best for an interested reader. I found talks the authors gave on youtube to summarize their arguments in case you didn't want to read Tooze's dry tome of a book. The book is ~800 pages long. It is dry. The talk is an hour & a 45. Believing that mere economics does not determine wars I recommend the most accessible operational history of the Germans to explain how they have a culture of achieving military victory inspite of poverty. I then remembered an illustrative case and provided a timestamped link to take you straight there.
You respond in 20 minutes, accuse me of bad faith, and provide as counter example a table of raw military production figures without consideration of any other economic factors.
I cannot help someone who, when provided extensive resources handmade specifically to make things easy, cannot even be bothered to look.
To anyone onlookers who've gotten this far. At least watch the Tooze video. See if my position is distortionary for yourself.
WestphalianPeace
10mo ago
I don't know the full extent of your knowledge of WW2. We could spend all day speaking past each other. You've got military production figures on hand from an archived source. I do take that seriously as more than the average person.
If you are interested, if you think the case is at least intriguing then please, at least watch the youtube videos. If you're convinced afterwards that I'm not arguing in bad faith then consider the books. Citino's books are actually rapt reading. Tooze is dry as a bone but if you can get past the first bit about manipulation of exchange rates then it becomes more engaging. The exchange rates chapters really do suck. It's worth it to get past them. I listened to it on audible and digested it over the course of a month. Because you get eye popping accounts of daily economic life like the following. Bolding & titles added by me
On the inability to stop a housing crisis in peacetime.
"Facing a continuing problem of overcrowding in the cities, in 1935 the Reich Labour Ministry launched an alternative vision of National Socialist housing in the form of so-called Volkswohnungen. Stripped of any conception of settlement or any wider ambition of connecting the German population to the soil, the Volkswohnungen were to provide no-frills urban housing for the working class, built according to the first projections for as little as 3,000-3,500 Reichsmarks. Hot running water, central heating and a proper bathroom were all ruled out as excessively expensive. Electricity was to be provided but only for lighting. Each housing unit was to be subsidized by Reich loans of a maximum of 1,300 Reichsmarks. Rent was to be set at a level which did not exceed 20 per cent of the incomes of those at the bottom of the blue-collar hierarchy, or between 25 and 28 Reichsmarks per month.
To achieve this low cost, however, the Volkswohnungen were to be no larger than 34 to 42 square metres. Though this was practical it was far from satisfying the propagandists of Volksgemeinschaft. The Goebbels Ministry refused to accept that accommodation of such a poor standard deserved the epithet 'Volkswohnung' and the DAF insisted that the minimal dimensions for a working-class apartment should be 50 to 70 square metres, sufficient to allow a family to be accommodated in three or four rooms.
But, as experience showed, the Labour Ministry's costings were in fact grossly over-optimistic. By 1939 the permissible cost of construction even for small Volkswohnungen had had to be raised to 6,000 Reichsmarks, driving rents to 60 Reichsmarks per month and thus pricing even this basic accommodation out of the popular rental market. The very most that working-class families were willing to pay was 35 Reichsmarks per month. Instead of the 300,000 per year that the Labour Ministry had intended, construction on only 117,000 Volkswohnungen was started between 1935 and 1939. As in the case of the Volkswagen, what Hitler's regime could not resolve was the contradiction between its aspirations for the German standard of living and the actual purchasing power of the population. But as in the case of the Volkswagen this did not prevent the D AF from espousing a Utopian programme of future construction.
By the late 1930s, the official ideal of 'people's housing' was a large family apartment of at least 74 square metres, fully electrified, with three bedrooms, one each for parents, male and female children. At the same time it was estimated that an apartment built to the DAF specification would cost in the order of 14,000 Reichsmarks, 40 per cent more even than those constructed by the Weimar Republic. The limitations of German family budgets, however, demanded that these generous apartments were to be provided to the Volksgenossen at monthly rents of no more than 30 Reichsmarks. In part, the costs would simply have to be borne by the Reich." - Wages of Destruction, pg 161
On the inability to produce cars economically in peacetime
In July 1936, the project began to slip definitively out of the hands of German industry. After a successful demonstration on the Obersalzberg on 11 July 1936 Hitler decided that Porsche's car was to be built, not in any of the existing car factories in Germany, but in a new special-purpose plant. Hitler claimed that this could be constructed for 80-90 million Reichsmarks. The factory was to have a capacity of 300,000 cars per annum and deliveries were to begin in time for the International Motor Show in early 1938. Faced with the impossibility of meeting the 1,000 Reichsmarks target on commercial terms, it seems that Germany's private car industry was on the whole content to see Porsche and his troublesome project transferred to the state sector. As a commercial project the VW was not viable. A factory built through the compulsory conscription of private business, along Brabag lines, would damage the entire industry. Far better to use public funds, or rather the funds of the German Labour Front (DAF). This suggestion seems to have come from Franz Joseph Popp, the founder of BMW, who also sat on the supervisory board at Daimler-Benz. Popp suggested that the DAF should take on the Volkswagen as a not-for-profit project. Non-profit status would qualify the factory for tax concessions that would help to cut the final price of the car. More importantly, from the point of view of industry, it would allow the sale of Volkswagens to be limited exclusively to the blue-collar membership of the DAF, thus reserving the profitable middle-class car market for the private manufacturers. The leadership of the DAF jumped at the chance. As Robert Ley, the leader of the DAF, later put it, the party in 1937 took over where private industry on account of its 'short sightedness, malevolence, profiteering and stupidity' had 'completely failed'.
In May 1937, with payments to Porsche and his design team totalling 1.8 million Reichs- marks, the industry cut its losses and ended its association with the VW project. On 28 May 1937 Porsche and his associates founded the Gesellschaft zur Vorbereitung des Deutschen Volkswagens mbH (Gezuvor). A year later, construction began on Porsche's factory at Fallersleben in central Germany. In October 1938, along with Fritz Todt and the aircraft designers Willy Messerschmitt and Ernst Heinkel, Porsche was awarded Hitler's alternative to the Nobel Prize, the German National Prize. The basic question, however, remained unsolved. How could the Volkswagen be produced at a price affordable to the majority of Germans? The DAF claimed that the Volkswagen was now to be promoted in conformity with Nazi ideology as a tool of social policy rather than profit. However, it too lacked any coherent system for financing the project. From the outset it was clear that the capital costs of building the plant would never be paid off by the sale of cars priced at 990 Reichsmarks per vehicle. The construction of the plant would therefore have to be financed through other than commercial means. The DAF, which had inherited the substantial business operations of Germany's trade unions, had assets in 1937 estimated to be as much as 500 million Reichsmarks. It also commanded a huge annual flow of contributions from its 20 million members. However, the demands of constructing the VW plant were enormous. Rather than the 80-90 million Reichsmarks originally mooted by Hitler, Porsche's planning now envisioned the construction of the largest motor vehicle factory in the world. The first phase, to reach a capacity of 450,000 cars per annum, was costed at 2.00 million Reichsmarks. In its third and final phase the plant was to reach an annual output of 1.5 million cars, enough to out-produce even Henry Ford's River Rouge facility. Investment on this scale placed huge demands on the DAF. The initial tranche of 50 million Reichsmarks to start work on the factory could only be raised by a fire sale of office buildings and other trade union assets seized after May Day 1933. Another 100 million were raised by over-committing the funds of the DAF's house bank and the DAF's insurance society.
The cars themselves were to be paid for by the so-called 'VW saving scheme'. Rather than providing its customers with loans to purchase their cars, the DAF conscripted the savings of future Volkswagen owners. To purchase a Volkswagen, customers were required to make a weekly deposit of at least 5 Reichsmarks into a DAF account on which they received no interest. Once the account balance had reached 750 Reichs- marks, the customer was entitled to delivery of a VW. The DAF mean- while achieved an interest saving of 130 Reichsmarks per car. In addition, purchasers of the VW were required to take out a two-year insurance contract priced at 200 Reichsmarks. The VW savings contract was non-transferable, except in case of death, and withdrawal from the contract normally meant the forfeit of the entire sum deposited. Remarkably, 270,000 people signed up to these contracts by the end of 1939 and by the end of the war the number of VW-savers had risen to 340,000. In total, the DAF netted 275 million Reichsmarks in deposits. But not a single Volkswagen was ever delivered to a civilian customer in the Third Reich. After 1939, the entire output was reserved for official uses of various kinds. Most of Porsche's half-finished factory was turned over to military production. The 275 million Reichsmarks deposited by the VW savers were lost in the post-war inflation. After a long legal battle, VW's first customers received partial compensation only in the 1960s. But even if the war had not intervened, developments up to 1939 made clear that the entire conception of the 'people's car' was a disastrous flop. To come even remotely close to achieving the fabled target of 990 Reichsmarks per car, the enormous VW plant had to produce vehicles at the rate of at least 450,000 per annum. This, how- ever, was more than twice the entire current output of the German car industry and was vastly in excess of all the customers under contract by the end of 1939. Assuming a production of 'only' 250,000 vehicles per annum - which was significantly more than the German market could bear - the average cost per car was in excess of 2,000 Reichsmarks, resulting in a loss of more than 1,000 Reichsmarks per car at the official price. Furthermore, even priced at 990 Reichsmarks the VW was out of reach of the vast majority of Germans. A survey of the 300,000 people saving towards a VW in 1942 revealed that on average VW savers had an annual income of c. 4,000 Reichsmarks, placing them comfortably in the top tier of the German income distribution. Blue-collar workers, the true target of Volksgemeinschaft rhetoric, accounted for no more than 5 per cent of VW's prospective customers. - Wages of Destruction, pg 156
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
I just beat the game. Depending on when you acquired some of your companions you might be locked into a class-path that isn't intuitive.
I respec'd Karlath and Shadowheart, eventually running the following party Main Character: Gale: Evocation Wizard Shadowheart: Life Cleric Astarion: Assassin Rogue Karlach: Berserker Barbarian
It's not complicated, but it gets the job done and lets you experience the game for the first time so that you can have fun making weird party compositions for your next run after you feel like you've got a strong handle on the game and know what to expect. Karlach is an HP tank that eventually becomes a khorne-tier murder berseker, Astarion does regular sneak attack damage, Shadowheart eventually becomes an high AC heal tank, and Gale give you the CC & sheer damage you need. Fireball solves everything.
Fought every battle normally and had a great time. With one exception. The True Soul Nere fight. Save scum. plant barrels. do whatever you have to do. That fight was an absolute nightmare and you can get screwed on spell slots due to its time restricted constraint.
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
Is there any desire out there for a book review of Whiteshift by Eric Kaufmann by someone who is not of Walt Bismarck's milieu?
It was brought up in the podcast and address's a lot of what Yasine brings up. But it's also a bloody tome to reread and something that someone without context of who I actually am could use to immediately disqualify any other points I may make in the future. So I'm reluctant to just put it out there.
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
For anyone who finds this type of military puzzle solving interesting I'd recommend listening to Drachnifel's video's on these exact US Navy Fleet Problems. Great write up on the history and use of such programs.
WestphalianPeace
10mo ago
As serious as the situation appeared to be in agriculture, it was not the issue of milkmaids and dairy prices that really troubled Hitler's regime in the summer of 1938. After months of bitter argument, the problem of dairy farming was given a political 'fix' by raising the farm-price of milk by 2 Pfennigs. Since Rudolf Hess had made clear that an increase in the prices paid by consumers was out of the question, the conflict was resolved at the expense of the dairies, by squeezing their profit margins. This did not curb demand for milk. Nor was it enough to resolve the income deficit of German dairy farmers. But it did at least send a political signal that the regime was not oblivious to the interests of its agrarian constituency
wages of destruction, pg 268
a perfectly healthy economy. Months of political argument followed by the state setting prices and then demanding that those costs be born by the producer. Then being surprised when the demand for milk is the same.
WestphalianPeace
10mo ago
From this point of view the fundamental explanation for the poverty of German agriculture was simple: low labour productivity. According to conventional measures, the productivity of the more than 9 million people employed on Germany's farms was roughly half that of the typical non-agricultural worker.84 What was really scarce in the countryside was not labour but the necessary capital and technology to use labour efficiently. Such productivity comparisons of course depended on the relative prices paid for agricultural and industrial products. And the RNS demanded higher farm prices, but this ignored the enormous gulf between the prices paid by German consumers for their food and the prices prevailing on world markets.85 By the late 1930s, however, the 'world market' as far as Germany was concerned was an increasingly irrelevant abstraction. Given the politicization of its foreign trade, Germany no longer purchased at 'world' prices. Instead, agricultural imports were bargaining items in a complex web of bilateral deals, in which Germany often paid substantial premiums for the willingness of its trading partners to remain loyal to the Third Reich.
wages of destruction, pg 266
a healthy economy is probably not one that has detached price signaling in exchange for political loyalty.
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
I'm really sorry if this post is too long. I hope it will be at least interesting. I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'representing one's preferences in 2D'. But if you find me crude, unimaginative, and close minded perhaps this post will be morbidly fascinating for you. Regardless, I'm thankful for your pushback.
I think what people find beautiful has a basis that is like 80% human nature, 20% human culture. An extreme example of the influence of culture. Japanese teeth blackening!
But I would find it strange if every human culture recreated it. Black teeth don't touch on the human nature nerve ending. It's a cultural influence on aesthetics that seems to die out when not constantly reinforced.
Meanwhile on the human nature aspect I think each person's aesthetic sense is the same filter that applies to nature as it applies to art. Thing's arn't beautiful and then we discover them. It's the reverse. We have beauty preference that reward or discourage us when we find them. These preferences reveal to others what our individual dispositions towards the environment are.
In the beginning there is an advantage for living near running water. That advantage builds into a reward signal for things that indicate running water, like shinyness. "Find running water" is too complex but 'happiness chemical reward for seeing shiny thing' is simpler to build into our nature. So now we have a preference for shiny things and we encounter Jewels. It's a worthless hunk of rock but that doesn't matter. It activates the same 'reward shinyness' part of the brain that is contextless.
It's the old AI joke. "Instead of programming AI to make people happy, why not program people to like Hydrogen. Afterall, there's a lot of hydrogen."
There is a reason we don't get happy about hydrogen. And it's the same reason why people worldwide like shiny things.
So what's beautiful in nature vs what's beautiful in art? Well if our aesthetics are our human nature with individual variation, mediated by culture, then the answer is nothing. Its the same sense organ applying to both objects.
which is why autistic people love Brutalism.
see the following image
On the left is a heat map showing where someone with a typical brain will focus their attention. On the right is how someone with ASD views the same house. Here's what Sussman and Chen state in the article:
Notice how a person on the autism spectrum, at right, avoids details like windows (which might suggest eyes) while a typical brain instinctively goes straight for them, without conscious awareness.
Pause here for a second and imagine Jane Jacob's eyes on the street concept. It's comforting for me to walk down a street full of windows and houses with front porches and pleasant symmetry. I generally welcome the interaction with my neighbors and, while not creepy about it, can't help but glance over now and then to see if I can catch their eye. I think that is typical.
Now imagine that your brain doesn't work that way. Imagine that your brain is completely overwhelmed by the eyes on the street. It's too much to take in, even just the buildings. Or it's an uncomfortable reminder that someone (unfriendly) may be tracking you. Now, is it possible you'd find some comfort — or perhaps just a noticeable reduction in tension — passing a building that instead looked like this?
So there is an instance of nature very strongly affecting preferences. Normal people like buildings that align with our caveman brain's constant search for faces. Austistic people hate making human eye contact. So now the whole world gets to endure Brutalism.
But then there is culture! It can't be thrown away entirely. Turns out we can break people's brains with enough repeated influence. My sincere apologies for the extended quote but it bears repeating in full. Bold parts were added in by me.
In Architectural Myopia: Designing for Industry, Not People we find that
, Gifford et al. (2002) surveyed other research and noted that “architects did not merely disagree with laypersons about the aesthetic qualities of buildings, they were unable to predict how laypersons would assess buildings, even when they were explicitly asked to do so.” The researchers traced this disagreement to well-known cognitive differences in the two populations: “Evidence that certain cognitive properties are related to building preference [was] found.”
Training to See a Parallel Reality.
Training is required to induce “architectural myopia” in a student, as the research suggests. The reason is that the peculiar industrial aesthetic now considered normal within architecture runs contrary to our physiological needs (Salingaros, 2006). We humans have evolved inside a complex, fractal, structurally hierarchical environment, so that our neurophysiology responds positively to and receives sensory pleasure from natural environments. Traditional architecture and urbanism in all of their multiple variations manifested over millennia and across geographical distances precisely follow this natural geometry, which is why our brains recognize them and respond to them.
Training adds additional layers of preference on top of our instinctive, evolved responses. Architecture school invests several years conditioning the student to respond preferentially to abstract industrial forms and surfaces. At the same time, this industrial aesthetic is touted as superior to all previous, traditional expressions of built geometry. Elaborate theories of history and technology are given as apologias for this now-correct aesthetic, solely appropriate to this wholly unique climax period in history (Banham, 1960; Giedion, 1941; Gropius, 1965). All of this effort creates individuals that see things differently from the rest of us.
This long-term program of psychological conditioning, has, since its development in the original Bauhaus, turned out to be extraordinarily effective. An architect experiences the world in a very different manner to any person who has not undergone the same training. By internalizing preferences derived from abstract images that override our neurological structure, over time, responses become automatic and crowd out other, more innate responses. The result of this aesthetic hegemony is the phenomenon of “architectural myopia”, an interpretation of reality that conforms to ingrained beliefs.
In those situations where emotion isn’t triggered instinctively by human physiology, our evolutionary makeup is not decisive and can be bypassed. Thus, in front of drawings or designs on a computer screen there is sufficient emotional isolation, and an architect judges the industrial, minimalist, “contemporary” designs positively as isolated objects possessing a pleasing clarity and monadic legibility.... At the same time, anything that resembles the complexity of traditional architecture is automatically judged negatively (its meaning is supposedly associated with reactionary or philistine culture) and it is rejected without any reflection.
In summary, yes. What's beautiful in art is what's beautiful in nature. It's the same instinct, influenced by culture. When you reveal a beauty preference you unavoidable reveal an aspect of how you perceive the world. All that's left is to discover is what percent of that is your predisposition or cultural molding.
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
I've also actually played some old school commercial wargames before! Historicon is a great convention with some incredible set ups.
And yeah when you find out about real life wargames you see that they fill that important niches of teasing out just how one might ought to respond under unstable circumstances. Kaiser Wilhelms insistence on winning the wargames he partook in was a gross violation of the Prussian traditional of the Professional General Staff.
Speaking from memory without a direct source I recall an anecdote that Field Marshall Paulus of 6th Army/Stalingrad fame wargamed how Operation Barbarossa would play out and concluded that after a few weeks of initial breakthrough the supply situation would become a shitshow, and then the entire offensive would grind to a halt near Moscow. I imagine he felt positively Cassandra-esque.
But for those proper military games implemented on a grand scale in real life - any war nerd worth his salt ought also to check out the Louisiana Maneuvers pre-ww2.
400k men moving around with umpires determining exactly what happened at each step. All done with 1940's technology. They had charts to figure out who beat who! Imagine maneuvoring around and then going "wait. I've got 20 dudes. You've got 10. But you have a machine gun and I have one mortar team. okay get a ref." and then waiting 30 minutes, getting a resolution, and then doing it all over again on the next hill. Mindnumbingly tedious but incredibly important for teaching US Generals what modern war might look like.
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
On further look
at your image "The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy" by Mearsheimer probably shouldn't be on there. Mearsheimer is a thoroughly mainstream author. Anyone studying International Relations will have to contend with the Realist school of thought and Mearhsheimer is pretty unavoidable.
Likewise putting "On War" by Carl von Clausewitz on there is a bit like saying Sun Tzu's "Art of War" is a banned book. It's not just "Not Banned" it's prominent and pushed. The casual reader will like Sun Tzu's small chapters writing style far more than Clausewitz's "let us consider War from Idealism first principles and also here's 200 pages on Napoleonic era reconnaissance" (skip the Napoleonic stuff, but don't ignore the Idealism. It actually important to his argument) But On War is still literally the first book that will be presented to anyone studying the Europe & it's descendants Way of War.
At most there is a vague sense of "Clausewitz is outdated because he deal with states and not non-state actors". But On War is the elephant in the room at any given time. No one gets a masters by saying "ehhh clausewitz is basically still correct". That doens't indicate any intellectual development. So while there is a bevy of people criticizing Clausewitz that certainly doesn't rise to the level of Banned Book.
WestphalianPeace
10mo ago
Some skilled construction workers were rumoured to earn better wages than senior army officers. And this was no accident. In May 1938, Hitler had removed control of the Westwall from the army's engineering depart- ment and handed it to Fritz Todt, the man idolized as the master-builder of the autobahns. Todt's mission was to complete the fortifications before the outbreak of hostilities and he was to do so regardless of cost. Goering's decree on labour conscription provided Todt with all necessary legal powers to secure the quarter of a million workers he needed. But typically for the situation of the German economy in the late 1930s he chose to supplement conscription with monetary incentives. The contractors on the Westwall were freed from standard military procurement rules, allowing them to inflate both their profits and their wage bills. By the summer of 1939, Todt had completed his mission. The most vulnerable sections of Germany's western frontier were reinforced with thousands of bunkers and gun emplacements. The price, however, was a huge inflationary shock to the labour market.
wages of destruction, pg 265
wanting to eat their cake and have it to. I want all my workers to have high wages. and i want the Westwall made quickly. but don't make it inflationary. and don't make it so that the high wage low-skill labour competes with agriculture.
WestphalianPeace
7mo ago
China. The world issue is China. In 1600 China was 29% of world GDP. By 1913 it was 8%. A small island nation on the fringes of Europe was capable of crossing the entire globe and imposing it's will upon the Heavenly Kingdom. Austria-Hungary, that corpse of an empire, would send troops to fight the Boxers. Germany had concession near Beijing.
Today the Chinese fraction of world GDP is back to ~20% and rising. It has aircraft carriers. It's the number one trading partner of almost every nation on earth. It's over 50% of world steel production. Over 50% of concrete production. Every single supply chain in the world interacts with China. In 1990 Shenzhen has 800k people. Today it has over 17 million. An entire NYC greater metro area has been birthed between that book in 1992 and today. And every country in the world has to adjust. The entire globe has gone from treating China as a non-issue to having to reconcile the return of China to global affairs. A world stage unseen for literally hundreds of years. What does the Chinese leadership want? How integrated should each nation be with it? How can any global treaty be efficacious if China is not on board?
Do you want to affect climate change? China is over 50% of global coal consumption. Chinese domestic coal consumption is a World Issue.
Do you want to affect global poverty? Chinese development alone has done the majority of lifting the global poor out of poverty, by sheer population scale. Any growing market today has to consider China as a factor, whereas previously the only game in town was the West.
Global security? World Peace? China. Now that Russia has torn itself asunder in Ukraine China is the last source of Great Power conflict.
For the longest time 'global issues' were just a proxy for 'concerns of the global community'. which in turn just meant this map. Now every country, on all issues, has to deal with sheer scale of the factor that China is back.
WestphalianPeace
10mo ago
And with the armaments effort reaching new heights, Goering's Decree for Securing Labour for Tasks of Special State Importance (Verordnung zur Sicherstellung des Kraeftebe- darfs fuer Aufgaben von besonderer staatspolitischer Bedeutung) of 22 June 1938 provided the Reich with general powers of conscription. Workers could be redeployed for any period required by the Reich, whilst their former employers were required to keep them on their rolls. By the end of 1939, no less than 1.3 million workers had been subject to such compulsory work orders. Though compulsion was not the norm in relation to German workers, any more than it was in the regime's dealings with German business, the possibility was now established that if rearmament demanded, the state could intervene in the working life of every single individual. In this respect as well, Hitler's regime clearly crossed a bridge in the summer of 1938. Perhaps not surprisingly, however, the rationing of labour functioned even less smoothly than the rationing of steel. The decree debarring rural workers from taking industrial jobs had to be abandoned, since, to avoid their children falling under the terms of the decree, rural families had taken to preventing them from entering farm work in the first place.
Meanwhile, in the inflation hot spots of urban Germany, the attempt to repress the market mechanism had only limited success. It was, after all, in the interests of neither employers nor workers to abide by the official wage restrictions. Workers wanted better wages and employers - keen to take advantage of the boom - were willing to pay for their labour. Given the formal ban on wage increases, the resulting upward adjustment of earnings was a covert process, hidden in accelerated promotion, high-status apprenticeships, retraining schemes, hiring bonuses, improved working conditions and a variety of supplementary social benefits. The extent of this 'wage creep' depended on the degree to which employers were subject to direct official oversight.
wages of destruction, pg 261
Nothing says "i'm developing an efficient economy" like compulsory work orders, forcing employers to keep workers on the rolls, and wage controls. Oh an forbidding rural people from taking industrial jobs. Good instincts there. Shame that second order effects exist. Who could have possibly imagined.
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
Despite the creator's pseudonym being Thames (implying British) I suspect the creator is actually Canadian. Either Old Stock Anglo-Canadian or the 90's generation of Cantonese/Korean first gen Canadian. There's also a smaller but real possibility of earlier Indian immigrant family who moved to Toronto specifically to get out of India and now feels like the Old World is chasing after them.
There is a quip later in the video about Indians & Tim Hortons. That's a Canadian specific stereotype. Nobody from East Anglia or Texas would have strong associations about Tim Hortons. In the US the association would be between Indians and 7/11, Dunkin Donuts, or even Motel chains. The UK I'm sure has it's equivalent. But the association of first resort would not be Tim Hortons.
I therefor conclude that the creator was born and raised in Brampton, Ontario and born in 2000. Brampton was extremely European pre-90s, 70% European in 96', and 60% European in 2001. It's now 18% European (mostly retirees) and 52% South Asian. These are circumstances were people falling into hate-spirals become a real possibility.
When Algeria was willing to commit ethnic cleansing ("by suitcase or coffin") it's population of French Europeans in Algeria was ~10%. Demographic shifts can make people go into dark places.
I am, of course, making up the exact age and location out of the flimsiest of pretenses. But I'm thoroughly convinced this is just another propaganda effort in the ongoing Canadian ethnic tension that now exists.
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
I would back On War if only to get it across to those seeking power that the point is to achieve a goal. it's to instantiate the world you desire. Too many find power, exercise that power, and then are befuddled when they didn't get what they want.
"But I won. I won the fight/beat the army/socially humiliated the opponent. Why don't they give up?"
well, if you didn't get what you want then you didn't actually win now did you? Art of War is great for impressing upon someone that they should maximize their chances of winning On War is great for impressing upon someone that they should know what winning looks like ahead of time and then pursue victory. Not the other way around.
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
I'd forgotten about the Japanese wargame carrier issue! Thank you for reminding me. I've never given the Pacific Theater the attention it deserves. Navies just don't click in my head the way they seem to hold a spell on some people. But yeah I'd heard about the carrier anecdote. Mind-numbing stuff. I've read enough books on the European Theater that I can sometimes see how the Germans would see things the way they did. But it's really difficult for me to get into the mindset of the Japanese regarding attacking America.
Actually I've been using your exact book as an audiobook to fall asleep to! (i already listened to it once properly. don't worry) I should probably read it as an actual physical book. The details stick better that way. If you like Stahel then you should definitely check out Robert Citino's trilogy. His accounts are fairly mainstream but he summarizes the mainstream take on things very well.
Got any other recommended books? If you havn't read/listened to Adam Tooze's "Wages of Destruction" then I can't recommend it highly enough.
WestphalianPeace
10mo ago
The frustrations of the housing shortage were no doubt acute. But, more worrying for the Reich authorities was the impact of underinvestment on the German railway system. By 1938 the Reichsbahn was increasingly unable to cope with the combined demands of the Wehrmacht and a booming economy. Rail investment had been badly squeezed by the steel shortage. In 1938 the Reichsbahn was not able to obtain even half the steel it needed to maintain its current rail infrastructure and rolling stock. From the summer onwards severe delays affected the entire system. Huge pressure was exerted on freight workers to speed up loading and unloading. But by the last days of September, as the Munich crisis reached its climax, the Reichsbahn was nearing the point of collapse. Less than half the requests for freight cars were being met on time. There was no option but to go over to an overt system of rationing in which priority was given first of all to the Wehrmacht and then perishable foods, coal, sugar beet and high-priority export orders.
Help. My rail industry is getting 50% of the steel it needs and I need to ration who gets transport. Should I start a Great Power conflict against all of my neighbors?
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
https://www.cnu.org/sites/default/files/architecture-poll.jpg
80% prefer left. 20% prefer right. When presented with other aesthetics I'm willing to bet that the 20% people will not dissolve randomly into like this or that. Their preference for uglyness will correlate. They'll find themselves saying 'you like Right? did you like B in the A/B painting over there? Omg I liked B too what are the chances'.
High. The chances were high.
I'm afraid I have no idea who Zendaya is.
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
A comprehensive history of how European Americans have imagined themselves overtime, the social conditions preceding each shift, when Reaction happened and how it manifested, leading up to the present day US, UK, & Canada.
In the podcast a lot of your comments seemed focused on Why not sort for the Cultural Trait Directly (The high IQ Ugandan) as well as Why focus on this broadest possible identity group (proxy of a proxy of a proxy). He doesn't really address point 1, but the entire book is about the inevitable social patterns people display regarding point 2.
Kaufmann traces over time how ethnic shifts intensify otherwise dormant identifications (case studies in voting patterns & self identification in the same city at 5%, 10%, and then 30% Hispanic. How previously blase National Symbols become are suddenly realized to be Ethnic Distinction symbols once the population of an area sharply shifts. Tipping points movement patterns in the UK mirroring the US), distinguishes between ethnic stories of 'who are we' changes vs how intermarriage may create more colorism distinctions, uses mono-racial but multiethnic societies as case studies for what happens when societies experience massive shifts over a short amount of time (Northern Ireland, Antigua, Ivory Coast).
Briefly flipping through it again (it's been a few years) It's really a mostly empirical work. As far as I can tell Kaufmann's primary adversary is less the cultural right than the old economic focused left. I'd contrast it with Mark Blyth's "Angrynomics" which makes the old left case for economics as the primary driver of social forces as an explanation for Trumps victory in 2016 and the broader populist shift in Europe. Kaufmann hammers over and over that the cultural conflict over ethnicity explains far more of the data in self-identification, voting patterns, school choice, internal migration, de facto spatial segregation, and support for X or Y policy.
It's most salient chapters for the non-academic are the final fourth and final. Kaufmann both extrapolates what will happens and then also illustrates a few plausible near future scenarios depending on how society responds. His go to example for contrast is Mauritius vs Mexico, which stand in for a closed off society vs an open mixed one.
They don't think it's ugly. They actually prefer it. They are the ~1% approve at the end of any poll about do you prefer building A or building B.
People like Ozy really exist. They really do have actual disdain for things a statistically normal person finds beautiful. From Ozy's own self-description:
This is Joan Miro's The Birth of the World
To them uglyness isn't ugly. It's genuinely mindnumbingly beautiful.
In Malcolm & Simone Collins "A Pragmatist's Guide to Sexuality" they model sexuality with two polarities, one for intensity and one for Yes/No. So most people have an inborn strong intensity towards Bloated Corpses and that is often paired with a disgust reaction. Makes sense evolutionarily. But evolution is a blind idiot god without context. So sometimes the intensity meter stays the same but for the Yes/No marker the 1 becomes a 0, and they become sexually attracted to Bloated Corpses with all the intensity that most people are repulsed.
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