WestphalianPeace
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User ID: 184
WestphalianPeace
1yr 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 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.
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.
WestphalianPeace
1yr 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.
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
There's also a few Hmong in French Guiana. Instead of bringing old allied Hmong to the metropole the French basically looked around, found an equivalent jungle geography, and sent them there. And instead of getting culture-bound diseases they flourished instead!
There's also several large enclaves of Mennonites/Anabaptists. I recall specifically in Bolivia and Argentina but there are probably some elsewhere.
Brazil used to have a sizeable Japanese diaspora in the millions.
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
My intuition is that it's
- an internal propaganda offensive to shore up internal support. Something to avoid the grinding stalemate narrative.
- a social taboo coup. US has restrictions on it's equipment being used to attack into Russian territory. Perhaps this offensive is intended to normalize the idea of fighting on Russia soil itself until the US gives permission to use donated equipment to strike inside Russia territory. There are many cases of Russia artillery attacking target in Ukraine and then scooting across the border to avoid retaliation. Get permission now and normalize the idea before the US presidential dice roll.
- There is no politics involved and it was just an intended to draw away Russian troops from further south. Russia has been slowly but successfully grinding forward there.
but mostly, be skeptical of anyone saying with certainty they know what it is.
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
Likewise for me.
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
I'd like to apologize to the critics of my post. Their comments deserve to be read as well.
It's a bad habit of mine to write in a fit of passion and then find myself unable to find the time or willpower to respond to critiques of my comments. But really, if you read my comment please also make time to read other people's criticism's of my case.
Should we bring back thee & thou?
We should.
As George Fox points out in his classic book titled
A Battle-Door For Teachers & Professors To Learn Singular & Plural; You to Many, and Thou to One: Singular One, Thou; Plural Many, You.
Wherein is shewed forth by Grammer, or Scripture Examples, how several Nations and People have made a distinction between Singular and Plural. And first, In the former part of this Book, Called The English Battle-Door, may be seen how several People have spoken Singular and Plural; As the Apharsathchites, the Tarpelites, the Apharsites, the Archevites, the Babylonians, the Susanchites, the Dehavites, the Elamites, the Temanites, the Naomites, the Shuites, the Buzites, the Moabites, the Hivites, the Edomites, the Philistines, Amalekites, the Sodomites, the Hittites, the Medianites, & c.
Also, In this Book is set forth Examples of the Singular and Plural, about Thou, and You, in several Languages, divided into distinct Battle-Doors, or Formes, or Examples; English, Latine, Italian, Greek, Hebrew, Caldee, Syriack, Arabick, Persiack, Ethiopick, Samaritan, Coptick, or Egyptick, Armenian, Saxon, Welch, Mence, Cornish, French, Spanish, Portugal, High-Dutch, Low-Dutch, Danish, Bohemian, Slavonian: And how Emperors and others have used the Singular word to One; and how the word You came from the Pope.
Likewise some Examples, in the Polonian, Lithvanian, Irish, and East-Indian, together with the Singular and Plural words, thou and you, in Sweedish, Turkish, Muscovian, and Curlandian, tongues.
In the latter part of this Book are contained severall bad unsavoury Words, gathered forth of certain School-Books, which have been taught Boyes in England, which is a Rod and a Whip to the School-Masters in England and elsewhere who teach such Books
We should value our language.
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
The problem with trying to make language rules explicit for students is that it violates two department's inclinations.
Linguistics majors are predisposed to fetishize change. They find language stability boring. Stability isn't why they got into this niche subject.
Meanwhile Education majors find education programs that work tremendously boring. They hate Direct Instruction, the 'Banking Model' of education, and they hate repetition. Doing sentence diagrams day after day isn't what inspired them to get into teaching.
What happens when you combine a group that finds teaching sentence structure boring with a group that thinks teaching kids grammar at all is inherently evil is that each group feeds into the other. The teachers are given an worldview that says they never need to teach sentence diagrams, they don't need to repeatedly explain the same concepts over and over again, and they don't have to awkwardly watch as some kids get it and some don't. The teachers in turn advocate for the linguist worldview. A Gordian knot is born.
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
One of the things Scott does not bring up is the lack of an easy narrative from the anti-woke right to allow people to an easy out. If you want victory over your opponents then make it narratively easy for people to recuse themselves until your opponent's coalition is miniscule. Give them plausible deniability, even if it's hollow. Make it as cheap as possible to defect from a coalition.
Your inspiration should be Winston Churchill fighting on behalf of Eastern Front legend General Erich Von Manstein to get him cleared of war crimes charges.
Within living memory of the war itself America & Europe constructed a narrative that recast Nazi's on the Eastern Front into Simple Soldiers merely Doing Their Duty, unaware of the war crimes amidst them. Even the former SS members were recast as what David Glantz describes "above reproach, knights engaged in a crusade to defend Western civilization against the barbaric hordes of Bolshevism". Which is bullshit of course, and to be clear Glantz arguing against this absurdity. But consider the power of the following narrative in giving people an out from their previous enmeshment with a regime.
The German army, or Wehrmacht, fought a "clean" and valiant war against the Soviet Union, devoid of ideology and atrocity. The German officer caste did not share Hitler's ideological precepts and blamed the SS and other Nazi paramilitary organizations for creating the war of racial enslavement and extermination that the conflict became.
The German Landser, or soldier, as far as conditions allowed, was generally paternal and kind to the Soviet citizens and uninterested in Soviet Jewry. That the German military lost this war was due in no way to its battlefield acumen, but to a combination of external factors, first and foremost Hitler's decisions. According to this myth, the defeat of Germany on the Eastern Front constituted a tragedy, not just for Germans, but for Western civilization.
For decades that narrative gave people an excuse. It took until the 90's for Germans to confront the reality of what the Wehrmacht did. But in that crucial period after the war there was a narrative path for millions of people to distance themselves from evil. Interested WW2 amateurs today decry the existence of wehraboo's and how many Japanese and West German officials were former members of their respective regimes but when I compare what happened with de-baathification it sure looks pretty efficacious.
and what's remarkable is that Scott directly links to Yarvin but only regarding Yarvin's coining of the term Brown Scare. And merely linking to Yarvin is a massive risk to Scott's reputability. But in spite of taking that risk he avoids the more relevant to the point at hand which is that Yarvin, from the ultra-right, makes a similar case for avoiding cycles of retaliation by means of giving people an out.
"There's a funny fact about regime change. The federal republic of Germany is still paying pensions not only to retired Stasi officers but also to retired Wehrmacht officers. It is accepted that both of those regimes were Germany. If you served those regimes, and you wern't some major criminal who was prosecuted, yeah, you're entitled to your pension. And the way that shut down worked is, that the day the doors of the stasi building were closed and these people were sent home, you couldn't reboot that system."
Yarvin is also fond of telling parables of Caesar constantly forgiving his enemies. He tells a tale of Caesar winning a battle and scavenging a bag full of letters that would allow his faction to engage in reprisals against every single person who supported his enemies. And that's Caesar's response was to burn the bag. A point independently echoed by Mike Duncan of the History of Rome podcast where Duncan points out that resolution of the civil war basically required someone to take it on the chin and not engage in property confiscation and tribunals after total victory.
So lets simplify and add one more bullet to Scott's list at the end of how to approach this problem instead of massive retaliation.
- Remove the laws that give rise to this culture
- Encourage universities to follow the Chicago Principles
- Improve internet moderation
- Make what Cancel Culture is explicit, not generable
- Weave a narrative that allows for mass defection
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
Sid Meir observed that people simply cannot process probabilities.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=MtzCLd93SyU&t=1168
"We found that there is this point, and it's kinda around 3 to 1, 4 to 1, where people do expect to pretty much win everytime"
30% doesn't mean about 1 in 3. It means impossible. He had to manipulate how the numbers played out in the background so that it fit with people's sense of what probabilities mean, rather than actual probabilities playing themselves out.
So far the only luck i've ever had explaining it to people is to say "most pollsters thought it was impossible. Silver said it was unlikely but about the same chance as hitting a baseball. and people do hit baseballs"
For some reason the baseball analogy is the only thing that seems to crack the innumeracy.
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
- the amount of calories in X doesn't count because 'it's good for you'.
- dividing 4 by 2 is too much math. calories counts are whatever it says in bold. checking serving amounts is an unreasonable and absurd ask
- "you can't expect me to just not socialize" when it's pointed that dieting and then a full meal at a restaurant twice a week is futile
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
Your 'Magic Wand Thinking' term is eerily familiar. I've internally termed it some variation of 'Tribal Brain' or 'Shaman Brain'. Just that acute sense that how the world must work is that there is Good Stuff and Bad Stuff. You either need to find the good stuff and it will all be better, or you need to excise the bad stuff and it will all be better. "The Dose Makes The Poison" makes no sense in this magic world. Good things are absolutely good and more is always good. Bad things are absolutely bad and the smallest dose will ruin everything.
But it's hard for me to be too harsh, even if it's despairing. Because whenever I read of one of those obscure African tribes that attribute all ills to witches or cargo cults in the Pacific it just feels like that's basement humanity. That's what we all instinctually revert to if we don't have constant social pressure from birth, or predisposition luck, to be otherwise.
I think there is also a gigantic intuition in the brain to go with whatever is the local social default. Human despise figuring thing out from first principles over and over again. Whatever others are having must be what's normal. Whatever others are having must be what you personally should want. Which makes sense in an amazonian, PNG, or savannah tribal context. But portion sizes have shifted to ridiculous extremes and now everyone is trapped is a default = poison context.
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
Social Construction radicals have to attribute all thought to social construction. They can't admit to any inbuilt preferences, only social constructs. So when they find someone's who has 'converted' they can't attribute it to helping someone who was already inclined to like X realize who they are. Instead it has to be that they finally broke through their socially constructed preferences into liberated ones.
In my personal experience with these types of people there is a strong case of "my expansive preferences are natural, which is proof that your narrow preferences are socially constructed." Similar to the 'well obviously we'd all fuck dudes if we could, but society would collapse so we need social pressure to keep men straight' phenomena. Just a total inability to model other minds. Very similar to polyamory people. Their end of bell curve genetic inability to feel jealousy is obviously perfectly normal. Your jealousy meanwhile is a patriarchal social construct you can be liberated you from.
For people on the tail end of the bell curve the typical mind fallacy is a hell of a drug.
I do think Tumblr took these people's pre-existing preferences and intensified their conviction of their moral superiority. AO3 is not Pornhub and everyone used to understand why they attracted different sexes. It took tumblr to convince people that the only reason men don't rely on AO3 is because they've been socially constructed not to. For the average person of this 'if we just push body type X enough people will change!' mindset I think it's more likely that they went to tumblr because they had a predisposition to like the art there and then got socially radicalized. Not that they were a straight guy who got converted and now wants to spread the good news.
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
just googled her. Yeah I see what you mean about winning a few Keynesian beauty contests. Anyone describing her as 3/10 is definitely outside my comprehension.
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 get that that's a thing but I'm generally skeptical. Until there is good evidence otherwise I take it for granted that people are honest about their aesthetic preferences.
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
Ahh I'm sorry if I gave that impression that I find these things equivalent. I was trying to use extreme examples to illustrate a point that the same trait that exists in the extreme also cascades down into the merely uncommon. I don't think most of these people are Bloated corpse tier, though those absolutely do exist. It's more a natural consequence of my point about propensity to intensity and yes/no being separate traits.
I think of it as a bunch of brackets. First there is the building that 70% of people prefer A to B. Then there are the aesthetic tastes of those who find themselves in the 20%. Those in the 10% minority opinion etc etc.
So for example I mostly find Stevens Universe to be ugly, but I get why it works and am willing to put up with it. Most people probably find it neutral. There is a certain person who adores its style and hates on actual beautiful things. I'd put them in the 30% bracket.
Then there is Ozy who appears to be the 5% bracket. Everything evolution selected for us to find beautiful/important, symmetry indicating health, indication of running water, open plains allowing for awareness of both predators and resources, kin to treasure and protect, Ozy's mind finds completely unstimulating.
Then there are the people who shudder with delight at the idea of fucking amidst flies over a bloated corpse. Sub 1% bracket.
Dunno if that changes your take on my take but I hope that clarifies my own intuitions on the topic.
From Bauhaus: A Graphic Novel, pg 50-54
"I saw them all, their faces as they crossed the threshold, their hands gilding over the textiles searching for the weave, their eyes reflected in the chrome plating as they let their certainties fall away....their certainties about what a house is, or an object...what a human being is, when there is no gender. In the 'Triadic Ballet' I want to show people move in space. The geometric forms represent the rationality that humanizes and merely stages physicality....and I wondered if, when they left the last room and went back out into the world, they would be able to look at it with the same revolution in their eyes.
The exhibition didn't convince the Landtag, which decided to shut me down: too expensive they said...but I was uncomfortable politically: the right-wing parties won the elections and we were bizarre and revolutionary creatures with socialist leanings. The masters' contracts were not renewed, and the Weimar experience ended on the first of April 1925. I was only six years old! Isn't it the same for everyone? You can still become anything but they tell you you're wrong....that you need to color within the lines, that geometry offers only a limited series of shapes, that words are to be written on the lines of a page. The control exerted by the outside world forces you to define your identity, while all you want is to experience yourself in the world. Your freedom is frightening for them.
This a very common sentiment in extremist left circles. Anarchists in particular. Shifting aesthetics first in order to subvert the current social order and show people that another world is possible. It's not intended to be demoralization, no one actually sits down and goes bwahaha now I will make the world ugly to demoralize my enemies. It's exaltation. Revolution. Religious ferver. It's the sincere conviction that they are breaking people out of Plato's cave and liberating them.
Destroy 2000 Years of Culture is a prayer, not a conspiracy.
I want to be clear though. This doesn't mean the average person making this kind of art is thinking in these terms. That's an entirely separate issue. It's more like how the average conservative might say 'washington is holding back Americans with too much red tape' and then when you keep digging at where that phrase came from you eventually find a Mises Libertarian arguing with a Ancap. Or how a normal left leaning person might say "Healthcare is a human right. We have to help everyone" and then when you keep digging at their phrase you find a Kropotkin-poster arguing with a Noam Chomsky fan about whether the point is to liberate humanity from all Social Exploitation or if it's about liberation from all Material Inequality which Generates Social Exploitation. The tails tug at the core.
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
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:
"One could very reasonably make the case that the natural human aesthetic sense prefers realistic paintings of beautiful landscapes with water, trees, large animals, beautiful women, children, and well-known historical figures"
"However, art of this sort leaves me cold"
"The first time I saw it, Joan Miro’s The Birth of the World moved me to tears from its sheer beauty. I make a special effort to visit it every time I am in New York City, including taking my husband to see it on our honeymoon so he could understand my aesthetics better. "
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.
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
I use race to point towards someone's uncontrollabe physical features. People generally default to height, hair colour, and skin colour but this also includes internal features like pelvic tilt affecting butt shape.
I use ethnicity to mean culture, language, & upbringing. But culture almost always includes an accounting of racial features. A Japanese Beauty is largely a social construct, but it includes notions of long straight black hair. Mormon face is apparently a thing. It would be strange to read accounts of "the ideal Dutch beauty" of the 12th century and find requirements for Afros, even if the other 90% just describes social virtues. Kaufman points out that while many cultures place a value of skin lightness relative to their own norm, they also find the extreme paleness of Europeans to be ugly.
So ethnicity accounts for race, but race is only at most a statistical indicator for someone's ethnicity.
I'd say your personal ethnicity has drifted away from the broader Moroccan core. Different cultures have different notions of what's within their cultural cloud vs what goes beyond the boundary. There are many accounts of people born and raised in Japan still being ostracized as 'not really japanese' because they don't fullfill 100% of all expectations of what it means to be Japanese. Many settler-colonial societies like the US & Canada meanwhile have a much more open conception of what it means to be American. Of course these self-conceptions can massively shift overtime, but there's always a self-conception. I don't know how expansive the Moroccan conception is but i'm sure it's something you've navigated & negotiated about with both your family and with strangers.
I was born in Canada but came to the US in my adolescence. When I go home everyone immediately comments on how American I've become. But most Americans didn't grow up being told to 'Go Back Where You Came From'. And every Remembrance Day I'm reminded of my difference from the typical American. Meanwhile my Jamaican-Canadian-American coworker complains about she feels racially alienated living in America. She misses Jamaica where everyone looks like her. But she's culturally a much cleaner fit into the American mainstream than I am.
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
I think we need to make a clear demarcation between race vs ethnicity even if the one often incorporates the other. The old Yamato Nadeshiko trope is a clear example of something that's like 90% behavior, 10% physical attributes.
So personally I think ethnicity groups are constructive/useful. I think a physical attribute description like race is only useful when it correlates with ethnicity with such overlap that it's meaningful information at a glance. People want the ethnicity information so badly that in monoracial societies people often play shibboleth games to figure out what someone's sub-identity is. Naming conventions/accent is a common one. My sister worked in a town that specifically renamed itself so that anyone who pronounced it as it's naturally read would be immediately outed as an outsider. To pronounce it 'correctly' you had to pronounce it incorrectly. Done after the American Civil War to identify Yankees. And I've heard that in Ireland a way to checking if someone is protestant or catholic is ask them what school they went to growing up. No idea if that information is outdated or just rumor though. But it illustrates the point.
On a racial level if a 3rd generation japanese-american visited Japan I think it's perfectly reasonable for the local Japanese to initiate conversation with him in Japanese after a quick glance and then be surprised when he only speaks English. But it would also be reasonable if the native Japanese looked at the 3rd gen, had a second to process all the other information, the manner of dress, hair style, posture, gait, social manners, nearby company, and concluded 'I bet that's an American'
There is also one other issue of identity groups being useful. And that is the tragedy of victimization on the basis of ones attributed race/ethnicity by others. As illustrated in the movie Operation Finale. A young woman is unknowingly courting the son of Adolf Eichmann. When Israeli agents explain to her that she's at risk to she protests that she and her family aren't Jews, her grandfather was Jewish but her father converted and they are good Catholics. To which the agents respond rightfully 'you think that matters to him?'.
I think it's useful, inevitable even, for people to form identity groups based off of mutual aid against threats they each can't avoid by disclaimer.
I hope my writing is precise. This is such an awful topic to discuss because of the constant ambiguous 2 step people perform going back and forth between race, ethnicity, and individual's position in race-ethnic-cloud-space.
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.
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