felis-parenthesis
No bio...
User ID: 660
felis-parenthesis
1d ago
1812
- aggroland is USA
- weakland is Canada
- moralland is UK
- timidland is Russia, which had a secret agreement with the UK (between the fifth coalition and the sixth) but only against Napoleon. No Russian troops to help the UK push USA out of Canada, so an example of an isolating alliance
Alternatively
1812
- aggroland is USA
- weakland is Tecumseh Confederacy
- moralland is Canada
- timidland is UK, who is in a chaining alliance and defends Canada against USA
1894
- aggroland is Italy
- weakland is Eritrea
- moralland is Ethiopia coming to the aid of an Eritrean rebellion against Italian rule, triggering the First Italo-Ethiopian War
- timidland is Russia. "The Russian support for Ethiopia led to a Russian Red Cross mission, though conceived as a medical support for the Ethiopian troops it arrived too late for the actual fighting,..."
1914
- aggroland is the Austro-Hungarian Empire
- weakland is Serbia
- moralland is Russia
- timidland is France, who is in a chaining alliance and comes to Russia's aid after Russia gets attacked for sticking up for Serbia (the actual history has Germany knowing that France will stick up for Russia, and getting its retaliation in first)
Additionally
1914
- aggroland is Germany
- weakland is Belgium
- moralland is UK
- timidland is USA, which ends up fighting on the British side in the end
1935
- aggroland is Italy
- weakland is Ethiopia
- moralland is Germany who supplied weapons to Ethiopia for the Second Italo-Ethiopian War
- timidland is UK which agreed with Germany, condemned Italy (reversing its 1925 secret agreement encouraging Italy), and ended up doing nothing
- timidland is Japan which mumbled a bit in support of Ethiopia, but ended up doing nothing.
1939
- aggroland is Germany
- aggroland is Russia (remember the secret protocol of the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact
- weakland is Poland
- moralland is UK
- timidland is USA, whose internal politics prevented any kind of alliance to back UK in supporting Poland, but ended up fighting.
felis-parenthesis
2d ago
The issue is "lumping" versus "splitting". The traditional way to cloud the issue is with slogans such as "abortion is murder", "taxation is theft", "property is theft". If some-one wants to push back against these slogans, they have to start with exposition, to put the erased nuance back into the discussion.
The slogan "abortion is murder" erases the importance of birth. That burdens the other side of the issue explaining why birth matters.
The slogan "taxation is theft" erases the notion of legitimate government. The other side gets burdened with reintroducing the notion of legitimacy before they can state their substantial point.
The slogan "property is theft" erases the common human experiences around incentives and the neglect of communal property. Those who disagree are on the back foot, trying to explain what it is like to be human to people who are pretending not to know.
The rhetorical trick that clouds the issue is the lumping term: "defensive alliance". Splitting that into chaining and isolating parts the clouds and lets the sunshine in.
felis-parenthesis
4d ago
I'm trying to talk about humans letting their language do their thinking for them. Language is mostly accident and happenstance. Language matters. Politically active persons have noticed. We no longer discuss "abortion" and "anti-abortion"; we discuss "pro-life" and "pro-choice". But my gut feeling is that deliberate attempts to shape the discourse by changing language are rare (or maybe common but nearly always unsuccessful to the point of vanishing without trace: who now remembers the attempt to re-brand atheists as "brights"?)
Instead our social antennae tell us which words have a positive valence and which words have a negative valence. We go with the words of pre-existing language, and choose the actions described by words with a positive valence. That valence is historical and lacking contemporary relevance. In effect, the valences of our terminology are random, and that randomizes our decision making. When we outsource our thinking to the old accidents that have formed the emotion valences of pre-existing language, we give up our human agency. That is bad.
For example, the phrase "defensive alliance" has a positive emotional valence. So we join together in "defensive alliances" and believe we are doing the right thing. My claim is that "defensive alliance" is not even the name of thing, so we literally don't know what we are doing. There are chaining alliances and isolating alliances. To join a chaining alliance is to live dangerously connected and you end up going to war. To join an isolating alliance is to live dangerously isolated and to fail to nip growing evils in the bud; war eventually comes to you. Perhaps war can be avoided, by one method or another, but we don't think the choices through and surrender our agency to words without meanings.
felis-parenthesis
5d ago
You might prefer this earlier version. It offers no real world examples.
Notice the problem with earlier version: it is too abstract. It gives the reader no reason to care. Of course we care deeply, but to get specific is to bog down due to the high emotion of those specific cases.
And then what? The traditional language of "defensive alliance" will automatically derail the discussion because it elides the vital distinction between chaining alliances and isolating alliances.
felis-parenthesis
11d ago
It depends on the price and what the sellers do with the money.
Perhaps the local capitalists have inside knowledge that bad times are coming and manage to sell at a high price before that knowledge spreads abroad. This is a leading indicator of things going wrong.
Or perhaps local capitalists have inside knowledge of better opportunities in Mexico. How will they raise capital? They can sell mature companies that they have built up earlier and invest in new companies with better growth prospects. This is a leading indicator of things going right and directly beneficial to Mexico.
felis-parenthesis
11d ago
There is a right answer, a wrong answer, and two distractors. The distractors focus the discriminating power of the test. If the distractors are almost right, even the clever get distracted and the test focuses on separating the very clever from clever. If the distractors are wrong, just not so blatantly wrong as the wrong answer, average test takers can find the right answer by elimination, and the detailed test results (separating out wrong versus distracted) serves to separate the very stupid and stupid.
The interpretation of
55% of Illinois 8th graders get this wrong.
will vary depending on whether the distractors are nearly right or nearly wrong.
felis-parenthesis
13d ago
The Anasazi question reminds me that adults forget what it is like to be young and are oblivious to the social constructs of middle age; there are cases to be made for B and C and a nit to be picked about D.
B The author depicts the Anasazi as doing fine weaving. Both by using the word, in the case of sashes woven from hair, and implying it in the case of basket, with a mesh without holes. fine is more work than coarse. Doing all that work will keep them busy. The child is probably dragged round the supermarket on shopping trips. Meat comes from the chill cabinet. Perhaps neighbors go hunting, but the child is discouraged from asking to go too, because guns are scary and dangerous. Hunting sounds forbidden and dangerous; certainly exciting. Hunting long ago, with a bow or s spear sounds harder and more dangerous. harder speaks to the Anasazi leading busy lives. You hunt, you catch nothing (you cannot just shoot your prey) so you hunt again the following day. You are kept busier than people today who can guarantee to get the whole weeks shopping with one car trip to the supermarket. dangerous might stand alone to the adult mind, but a child will pick up the message that the Anasazi lead exciting lives. B is a contender.
C "baskets woven tightly enough to hold water." is a strange claim. The child might have been paying attention when history covered the Spanish Armada. Sir Francis Drake Singed the King of Spains beard. One historian emphasizes burning stocks of seasoned timber, needed for wet cooperage. Wet cooperage is when a cooper makes a barrel so well that it is suitable for storing water. That is much harder than dry cooperage and needs seasoned timber. Burn that and there are no new barrels for storing water on board ship. No barrels, no Armada. What the attentive child knows is that holding water is a major pain under earlier, lo-tech conditions of life. The author is depicting the life of the Anasazi as difficult in two senses. First they do impressive feats of basket weaving. That is technically difficult. Second, they are likely forced to do this by a lack of technology (though what has gone wrong with their pots? Why aren't they holding water in pots? Unsuitable clay? Lack of glazes?). We would ordinarily summarize the problems posed by lack of basic technology by saying that life was difficult.
The author talks of beautiful pottery and turquoise jewelry. The thirteen year old boy answering the question knows just what the author is talking about. It is the fine china that lives in the cabinet, and the Meissen figurines, with their boring pastel colors. The limbs are not articulated, eliminating any play value, and you are not allowed to play with them anyway because of their impractical fragility. Turquoise jewelry is stupid, girly crap. The author is implying that the Anasazi lead lives that are boring as fuck. dreary is one of the polite adult words for this, difficult and dreary. C is a contender.
D Since the author uses the word peacefully, the use of the word peaceful immediately makes D a strong contender. The problem lies with the word productive having two conflicting meanings. A school pupils perhaps learns the school room notion of productivity from history lessons on Luddites and weavers. Power looms made weavers more productive. A lot more productive. It made those who wore clothes better off by bringing down the price of cloth. That is a lot of people and a big price fall, so a huge gain overall. On the other hand, weavers who expected to be better off, because prosperity comes from productivity, were shocked to find the surplus of cloth and the resulting price falls more than offset the gain in the amount of cloth produced. productive is an output measure, not an input measure. productivity is a specific measure of output: output per hour of labor.
You are productive when you pour a sack of polyethylene pellets into the hopper of your injection molding machine and produce a thousand water bottles an hour. You are unproductive when you spend a week or two weaving a basket so tightly that it just about holds water.
The alternative meaning of productive lies at the intersection of pastoral romance and the Protestant work ethic. You are unproductive in the taverna, drinking Ouzo and playing Back Gammon. You are productive when you return to your farm and tend your olive grove. It is not about the fertility of the grove or the price of olives. You are unproductive when you play a video game; you are productive when you write the program for a video game (but why would any-one buy a video game if playing it is disparaged as unproductive?)
Since I'm middle aged and middle class I'm acculturated to school as a center of pointless busywork that keeps children off the streets. The devil finds work for idle hands, and we use the word productive to praise keeping those hands busy with the right kind of pointless busy work (such as making beautiful pottery that doesn't hold water, and turquoise jewelry). It contrasts with the word unproductive which disparages the forms of pointless activity preferred by younger persons or those of lower social class.
Answer D is checking that the children are picking up the correct meaning of productive. Are they well on their way to being middle aged and middle class? We wouldn't want them saying that the Anasazi are "unproductive and peaceful". We prefer them to have a fashionable sense of "Ted Kaczynski"-lite, and ignore the crassly industrial notion of productive.
I'm in a pickle. I don't know what my comment implies. On first reading I'm defending the intelligence of Illinois 8th graders. They are not stupid, the question is bad. On second reading I'm trashing a question, chosen by a clever person, to illustrate a point. That is to say, chosen by a person who is clever compared to other people. But the question is still trash, so even "clever" people are smug and stupid and we as a species are ultra-doomed :-(
felis-parenthesis
13d ago
I agree with your observations of internal tensions in the US, but think that they admit the exact opposite interpretation. Sometimes governments welcome a war because it rallies their country behind them and allows them to crack down on internal dissent. The classic example is the 1871 unification of Germany. As Wikipedia puts it
To get the German states to unify, Bismarck needed a single, outside enemy that would declare war on one of the German states first, thus providing a casus belli to rally all Germans behind.
The prominent example for British and Argentinians is the invasion of the Falklands. Again, Wikipedia offers a blistering quote
Galtieri's declining popularity due to his human rights abuses and the worsening economic stagnation caused him to order an invasion of the Falkland Islands in April 1982.
The idea that a successful foreign war can rescue a flailing regime or unify a fragmented county, is common. Chinese war planners may actively decide against throwing a lifeline to a failing US by gifting them a foreign war. Much wiser to wait patiently for the US to self destruct to the point that they lose interest in Taiwan. Without US protection, Taiwan may be persuaded to give up without a fight.
felis-parenthesis
14d ago
I seem to be missing vital context, necessary to follow the law review article. In the United Kingdom the problem of "who pulled the trigger" is solved by the notion of joint enterprise
Until 2016, the courts interpreted the law to mean that if two people set out to commit an offence, and in the course of doing so, one of them commits a different offence, the other person will also be guilty of that offence if they had foreseen the possibility that it might be committed.
For example, if two people set out to commit a robbery, but in the course of the robbery one of them pulls out a knife and commits a murder, the other party will be guilty of murder on a joint enterprise basis if he foresaw this as a possibility, but did not himself intend it.
Thinking about that myself, it strikes me that even UK law is not quite ruthless enough. Here is my theory of how a "two robbers, one shot" case should go.
"proof beyond reasonable doubt" is not a terminal value. The actual goal is to solve an optimization where the two big desiderata pull in opposite directions. First, one wants to live under a justice system that suppresses robbery and murder, so that one does not get robbed or murdered. Second, one notices that justice systems tend to turn into injustice systems. A naively designed justice system will turn into a graver risk than that posed by robbers and murders constrained by no justice system at all. At least in the absence of a justice system one may possess weapons and fight back.
The social dynamic is that a naively designed justice system that suppresses robbery and murder is a power honey pot that attracts the worst kind of people. In time the police force is manned by two kind of people. The first are smart criminals who join the police to abuse police powers and rob and murder under color of law. The second kind of person starts of good, but is corrupted by absolute power and the malign influence of the first kind of person.
We have solutions to these problems. We split the justice system into three parts. The police investigate. The Crown Prosecution Service presents the case to the judge. The judge listens attentively to the defense explaining why the prosecutor is wrong. The instrumental value "proof beyond reasonable doubt" is there to poison the honey pot. Only nerdy, wannabe Sherlock Holmes become detectives and their personal motivation is to crack the case and find out who really did it. Needing to provide convincing proof for the prosecutor to present to the judge filters out personality types who would otherwise be draw to the power wielded by the justice system. The wrong kind of person is filtered out because the system wields power as a system; no individual gets to indulge their personal power trip.
Return to the "two robbers, one shot" conundrum. We don't actually care which one pulled the trigger, and are happy to hang both of them. That works well to further the first goal of suppressing robbery and murder. If we care who pulled the trigger, a smart robber might find himself a stupid and violent partner, to do the bloody part and take the drop if the victim dies. Ugh! We don't want that. But what of the second, more troubling goal, of poisoning the power honey pot, to avoid attracting the sort of person, attracted to police work for power and personal gain? The prosecution still need to prove the robbery element beyond reasonable doubt. And they still need to prove the murder, except for exact attribution, beyond reasonable doubt. I think that the honey pot remains poisoned, even without needing to say which robber fired the fatal shot.
felis-parenthesis
19d ago
I bumped into an earlier example when reading G. K. Chesterton's autobiography. Born in 1874, he writes that he was taught Christianity at a mainstream school by teachers who were not themselves Christians. This took me by surprise. We are talking about around 1890, and there is a Cathedral near where I live, built 1879, spires added 1913-1917. There is a contradiction between Chesterton's account of his post-Christian upbringing at a time when people are still building Cathedrals.
Chesterton doubles down, proposing that enthusiasm for Empire was a substitute for loss of Christian faith. People need to believe in something, and if Christianity has faded, they will latch on to something else.
My guess at the social history involves Darwin and the debates following his 1859 publication of The Origin Of Species. The London intellectuals of the generation before Chesterton respond by quietly giving up on Christianity. Meanwhile, others are participating in various Victorian Religious Revivals. Christianity looks healthy, but society's thought leaders have abandoned it. Christianity rots from the top down, and elites, such as C. S. Lewis experience a post-Christian country, while others are still happily attending Church.
felis-parenthesis
25d ago
Because the actual history is messy and embarrassing to every-one.
The early medieval church was clear enough that belief in witch-craft-as-real-magic was superstition left over from the bad old days (think 800 AD). Witch-craft-as-baseless-superstition was heresy and subject to punishment, but you could get in trouble both ways. You committed heresy if you put yourself forward as a witch who could really do the magic. You committed heresy if you tried to protect society against some-one who you asserted was a threat because they could really do the magic.
Then, starting around 1400 AD (but slowly at first) mankind regressed, becoming afraid of witchcraft-as-real-magic.
This is obviously embarrassing to the Catholic Church, who knew the truth and lost it. But it is embarrassing to Enlightenment thinkers too. First, the deterioration happens late; the early stirrings of modernity are making people less rational. Second, the Enlightenment could have taken witch burning as showing the fragility of human knowledge and a case study in losing truths once known. But instead it just ignored the real and troubling story in favour of bashing the Church as always in error.
Recall the story that Columbus met opposition to sailing West to China from people who believed that the Earth was flat. It originated in a "biography" that changed the story to make it more dramatic. Then anti-Catholics took it up, because the flat earth myth was a convenient stick to beat the Catholics. There is a problem with anti-religious campaigners just making stuff up.
I find this disillusioning. As a young man I believed that the 18th Century Enlightenment guys were the good guys who were opposing the Catholic Church (who were the bad guys because they just made stuff up). Now I find that every-one is just making stuff up. And twisting the witch craft story to bash Catholics isn't the only example, so I cannot excuse it as "just once".
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even blocks may die.
More options
Context Copy link