johnfabian
5mo ago
Here's a fun historical hypothetical: say you wake up tomorrow and it's May 1944, and Dwight Eisenhower comes to you and says "TheMotte User X, you are our top expert on collateral damage. Our forthcoming invasion of Fortress Europe has to succeed, or else condemn millions more innocents to die at the hands of Nazi Germany. Our plan is to maximize our chances of victory by bombing enemy fortifications, re-supply, repair depots, airfields, road junctions, marshalling yards, rail bridges, training grounds, troop barracks, radio transmitters, telephone exchanges, fuel and ammo dumps, and more. Furthermore once on the ground, our soldiers will make use of their supreme material, technological, and doctrinal advantages in naval and land artillery to crush German resistance in all environments, be their urban, rural, or fortified. Inevitably this will result in the deaths of French civilians, who are not only innocent of Nazi crimes but victims of them, and our allies in this fight. So the crucial question I pose to you is: how many French civilian deaths are tolerable to ensure the success of Operation Overlord?"
What would your answer be? What would you consider reasonable? Could you come up with a specific number as a threshold for what you would deem acceptable civilian deaths? (Ideally don't look up the actual number before coming to an answer for yourself)
This is also not meant to be a direct analogy to any extant geopolitical crisis; its function is primarily a thought experiment and not a commentary upon or justification for acts of any specific government.
Overriding the Constitution to avoid negotiating with janitors
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has a little escape hatch that has gotten more attention in recent years. By now I suspect there are even a handful of Americans who have heard of the notwithstanding clause; a segment of the Charter that allows provincial/federal governments the ability to temporarily pass laws that violate certain Charter rights (essentially all the rights except those that pertain to the democratic process). The Canadian Charter is a very popular document (in my opinion, it's one of the best things about my country), and the notwithstanding clause gained a sort of mystical aura in Anglo Canada since 1982 as a big red button that Should Never Be Touched. Outside of Québec, it had only been used a handful of times, and for fairly minor issues that many times were deemed by the courts unnecessary after-the-fact. A few other times it had been employed as a sort of rhetorical tool or threat, ultimately avoided because the legislatures did their job and resolved whatever problem they faced without having to use it. The political norm against not abusing it had become very strong.
Enter Doug Ford. Not the most respectful of norms (in the style of his late brother, who as Mayor of Toronto did a number of turned-out-to-be illegal things, and I'm not talking about smoking crack). His first use of the notwithstanding clause was immediately upon gaining power in 2018, in order to halve the size of the Toronto city council in the middle of Toronto's municipal election. Traditionally the provincial government does not interfere in the affairs of municipal governments, but again this was tradition only and ultimately the courts found that the use of the notwithstanding clause was not necessary. In 2021 he used the notwithstanding clause again to limit third-party political advertising in the run-up to the provincial election that he handily won. In this case the courts did rule that his actions were unconstitutional as they were restrictions on freedom of expression.
But his third use of the notwithstanding clause is the most bizarre, norm-upsetting, and (to me) infuriating of all. The contract for the province's school workers (janitors, early childhood educators, school monitors, basically the blue-collar school employees) is up. The average employee in this union makes $46k CAD (~33k USD). Their wage increases over the last decade was lower than last year's inflation. And meanwhile the cost of living has exploded, especially in the province's most populous areas. So obviously the province owes it to these critical workers to give them a good deal, right? This is not a case of some fat public-sector union, and the provincial government and society at large has spent the pandemic fêting the heroics of these essential "front-line workers".
Well, no. Instead the government is using the notwithstanding clause to override their Charter right to strike. Note that this is not back-to-work legislation; that process involves binding both parties to a neutral arbitration process that tends to give labour a fair shake. Instead this is the unilateral imposition of a labour contract by the state, a first in modern Canadian history. The union has declared its intent to strike anyways, but because this would now be illegal, the potential fines for this are up to $200 million per day.
There are no legal countermeasures available to the union. The provincial governments in Canada are very strong by design, but this was supposed to be balanced by social norms against abusing these powers. But with the increasing polarization of Canadian society and centralization of power within political parties, apparently the weight of the potential backlash has been weakened. It was never the intent of the notwithstanding clause to give provincial governments the ability to just force people to work on the state's terms because they can't be bothered to negotiate, yet here we are regardless. Unless the Prime Minister (or the Governor General) were willing to intervene from on high and use their big red button that Should Never Be Touched (disallowance), there's nothing to be done. But that would kick off a constitutional crisis over janitors, and I don't think Trudeau has the balls; he's no friend of labour regardless and oddly buddy-buddy with Ford (that's another topic though).
Even if you were indifferent to the situation of the workers, there's reason for concern here. This kind of flagrant norm-breaking is what tends to start unraveling countries. The notwithstanding clause was not supposed to be employed this way; indifferent and repeated use of it could turn the Charter into a piece of paper. What's to stop other provincial governments from using their powers in this way? What's to stop retaliation when some other party inevitably comes to power? It used to be that Canadian politics was largely regional, with provincial and federal representatives responsive to local concerns and willing and able to keep their leaders in line. That's gone. The safeguards against misuse of power have disappeared.
The strike starts on Friday, and I'm going to be out showing my support. I've tried to keep this write-up somewhat tonally neutral, but I'm truly incensed about this.
johnfabian
7mo ago
I think this will be bad for Bibi. It's one thing to have occasional rockets slip through the Iron Dome and kill a civilian or two per year. It's another thing to have this happen on his watch. The legitimacy of Likud is that their hardline approach delivers results with respect to the security of Israel. When the dust settles opinion might turn on him; I think this might happen regardless of whether there will be a general political shift.
I think the decision to slowroll settler expansion in the West Bank in exchange for petty violence from Palestinians was a very deliberate one, but this level of violence will probably force some kind of shift in Israeli strategy, one way or the other.
It's pretty wild to imagine how different history may have been if that vote had swung another half percent in the other direction.
The result would not have been Québec leaving Canada, but there probably would have been a marked increase in French/English antagonization, as well as presumably French/indigenous strife. The 1995 referendum question was much too vague; while the PQ fully intended that a 50+1 Yes vote would allow them to proceed with a negotiated or unilateral secession, how it would have played out in reality is doubtful. Subsequently the Supreme Court adjudged that provinces do have the right to secede, but it requires "a clear question and a clear answer" (neither of which the 1995 vote had), and that would oblige the federal government to negotiate an exit for whichever party was seceding.
But one could certainly imagine a lot more social strife and culture war if the vote totals had been reversed. For reference here is the referendum question:
Do you agree that Quebec should become sovereign, after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new economic and political partnership, within the scope of the bill respecting the future of Quebec and of the agreement signed on June 12, 1995?
I imagine that for many it was very much less than clear what this entailed. This was of course, by design.
johnfabian
6mo ago
I think you know that's a rather markedly atypical use of the word "liquidate". I'm inclined to think you are trying to be deliberately inflammatory, and (poorly) pretending otherwise.
"Ah you see officer, when I said on twitter that Hamas should liquidate all the Jews I simply meant that they should be provided with refreshing beverages!"
johnfabian
4mo ago
The Trudeau government has been particularly bad (or deliberately bad?) at anticipating second-order effects.
johnfabian
6mo ago
I think you're underestimating how much one can do with makeup. Among my siblings, me and my younger sister have brown hair, brown eyes, darker complexions, and at least with my sister I've seen her very convincingly go "mock Indian" with the right makeup/style/accessories (we're like around 5% Métis or whatever; multiple full-blood indigenous relatives from the early 19th century, by all accounts more than Ms Ste-Marie).
My older sisters are both fair, blonde, blue-eyed and would not pass muster as indigenous even though we all have the same parents and otherwise resemble each other strongly. Similarly Ste-Marie looks very much like her (fairer) brother
johnfabian
3mo ago
You actually support Diocletian's reforms? umm, yikes.
johnfabian
2mo ago
The sites died out because their format of pouring incandescent hot rage into your eyes has moved to youtube, tiktok, twitter, etc. Those offer either condensed format or visual augmentation, whereas for as bad as those former sites were for humanity they at least forced you to READ a bit.
The comments on youtube/tiktok/whatever are still largely unmoderated even if the more text-based social media sites are.
johnfabian
1yr ago
Oh boy. This is one of my pet political peeves. It got discussed a few times on /r/slatestarcodex with the head of this project (Alon Levy) even chiming in a few times. I've got a bunch of ideas.
1. Institutional incuriosity
Transit agencies in the USA and Canada are super myopic. There are of course entire regions of the world where transit is built and operated cheaply and effectively, but very curiously North American transit agencies seem to make absolutely no attempt to figure out how they do it. When you read about the planning reports done for projects in North America, what they are compared to are almost always other North American projects. Right down the line, from things like technologies to bid structuring to consulting to public-private partnerships to art design, the "best practices" that are emulated are not in fact the best practices, but the best North American practices (which pretty severely limits your potential from the get-go). I could draw from dozens of examples in this regard, but maybe the most egregious case study for this is the California high-speed rail project which decided to ignore the accumulated six decades of HSR experience elsewhere in the world in lieu of creating a "made in America" solution to every problem they encountered. Part of this institutional incuriosity I think is a result of over-regulation; in the past North American rail projects were severely handicapped by onerous safety rules which forced them to use trains much heavier than those of Europe and Japan, but those regulations were spiked during the Trump administration so it's no longer an excuse. It also doesn't help that since there have practically been zero privately-run new rail projects since the 1970s in North America, an entire generation of people who might have had experience working with this has disappeared.
2. Infighting between relevant governments/agencies
There's a German planning proverb that goes "Organisation vor Elektronik vor Beton", literally organization before electronics before concrete. The idea being that when you want to do a project, the biggest gains in productivity and cost savings come from getting everyone on the same team first. North American transit politics often sees the opposite: where different transit organizations that overlap in jurisdiction see each other as competitors for funding and riders. In lots of North American cities the different transit organizations are downright hostile to each other; they refuse to share transfers, they won't show each other on their route maps, they bicker and fight about everything and won't share any infrastructure. Meanwhile in cities like Tokyo where most of the transit is privately-run the various organizations see each other as complementary hubs in a wheel, vital to the other's success.
This translates often into poorly-run transit with little cooperation, obviously, but also contributes to cost overflows. Amtrak wanted $10 billion (read: actually $30 billion) to dig a new tunnel under Philadelphia for high-speed rail... because SEPTA refuses to give them any space in their under-capacity 4-track tunnel.
Or in Europe and Japan you often see regional transit authorities band together when ordering new buses or trains, because the economies of scale offer significant savings when they order 200 trainsets together rather than each insisting on bespoke custom runs of 10. That kind of larger-scale cooperation effectively does not exist in North America. Not only is there a lack of standardized design and operational practices, there is outward hostility to any form of cooperation.
3. Inability or unwillingness to manage cost overruns
There are political dimensions to it. Part of it is I think that in the North American context, especially in the age of diminishing state capacity, politicians kind of like to throw big amounts of money around - it's a proxy for how much they care. Therefore it's not really a bad thing if you spend $5 billion on a project that should cost a quarter of that - look how important transit is!
I think it would be naïve to discount organized crime elements here. At least in Toronto the 'Ndrangheta silently have their hand in just about every public works contract (for a good laugh check out which Ford donors own land along the proposed new highway 413). If there isn't an organized crime element to how much we pay for transit than we're getting ripped off much worse than we think, especially because Italy actually builds transit quite cheaply.
There's also some institutional culture going here. There has been more and more investigative journalism about the extent to which governments rely on private consulting to make decisions for them; where to put the benches and exits in stations, notes about architecture, technology choice, etc. Part of this is in general an erosion of state capacity: the best and brightest don't work for the government, and there aren't many to begin with. (By contrast the Paris transit corp RATP has about 2,000 engineers on-staff). But the worse element, at least according to the people I know who've worked in these roles, is that the consulting groups are paid to provide cover for the people in charge when decisions go wrong and costs inevitably balloon. Then you can trot out this study you paid $15 million for and say well, this was what was suggested to us, we just confirmed their decision.
4. Political interference
Municipal politicians tend to have a lot more influence in what does or does not get built in North America. This is generally the opposite of what happens in Europe, where long-term plans are either established by arms-length governing bodies or by some kind of binding referendum. But largely what does not happen is that some new person gets elected and the existing plans get chucked. Planning is done for the long-haul, not for short term changes in opinion or cash windfalls. Part of this is the distribution of revenues and funds; transit organizations in Europe tend to get long-term budgets which give them the capacity to chart their own course with respect to new projects and maintenance, instead of hapharzardly injecting funds according to campaign promises.
The role of individual politicians in the transit-building process also increases potential for corruption and lobbying. It's not that NIMBYs don't exist in Europe: they do, and they try their best to hamstring projects (like the UK's probably ill-fated HS2, or Stuttgart 21). But the political levers they have at their disposal tend to be larger (like referendums) rather than things like the environmental assessment process or community engagement which are more vulnerable to people who disproportionately care (meaning: hate) the project. Common law might have a role in this.
I could go on about all this forever. But my general point is that North America desperately needs to look inward on this. If the idea is that we have to shift our transportation off fossil fuels (and we do), and that a good chunk of the transition to electric transport means new transit (and it does), then we have to get much better at getting bang for our buck, because right now it is downright pathetic. Look to the countries that build transit cheaply (Spain, Sweden, Italy, Korea, are all positive examples). Look to the countries that build transit expensively (North America, China, Russia). Figure out what people are doing right, and what people are doing wrong, because in general the correlations between high-cost and low-cost countries are not wages, or systems of government, or geology, but rather institutional competence.
johnfabian
11mo ago
Why is anyone wasting any money on any of this stuff in the first place?
It's insurance against employee lawsuits for mistreatment. If Employee X complains about harassment of a sexual/racial/whatever nature from Employee Y, the company can say "well Employee Y went through mandatory sensitivity training for all these things. Obviously this is not a part of our corporate culture. We have no legal or moral responsibility for what happened."
There are true believers involved at various levels presumably, but it's a lot easier to be a true believer if your economic incentives align with it as well.
johnfabian
1yr ago
I've got a deep enough knowledge base that I think I can wade in with an answer. First thing to note: what you are describing as "colonialism" is, very roughly speaking, three very different types of colonialism.
In the first instance, you have what I'd call "merger" colonialism. This was the kind practiced in central and south America by the Spanish. When the Spanish landed in the New World, they found themselves two large, urbanized, literate, complex, and populous states in the Triple Alliance and Inca. Both probably had a larger population than Spain itself at the time (Mexico probably had something like 2.5-3x the population of Spain), and both had expanded very rapidly in the century previous. They were big, overstretched empires with lots of internal and external enemies, who were very glad to help these strange dudes in shiny clothing who happened to show up just in time for serious strife. It's hard to overstate just how lucky the Spanish conquest of the Americas was in retrospect, and difficult to understate the degree to which aid from rival indigenous groups helped topple the Aztec/Incan empires. In any case, the Spanish did not wipe out the previous governmental or state structures; rather they placed themselves at the top and married into important local dynasties. The subsequent Spanish crown colonies had a Mestizo elite (that Castile often tried to push back against).
In the English/French colonization of North America, the situation was quite substantially different. Serious attempts at colonial ventures began roughly a century after the Spanish entry into the Americas, and somewhere on the order of 60-80% of the indigenous population of North America had died off from introduced diseases in the interim. The east coast of North America had already seen a fair amount of trading and interchange even if there had been no serious attempts at settlement, and the tribes living along the coast (and somewhat less so into the interior) were ravaged with disease. Somewhat more amusingly you have anecdotes like how when the Plymouth Colony landed the first native they met greeted them by asking in English if they had any beer. Unlike further south there were no large states to conquer; even the Iroquois Confederacy which gave European settlers such a hard time peaked at only slightly more than 10,000 people. This was in large part a virgin land with the large bulk of the pre-existing population destroyed before arrival. Settlement did not face the same military response, nor were settlers obliged to marry into indigenous families. The climate was also much more favourable to Europeans and largely lacked the (imported) African diseases that made the Caribbean so deadly to settlers post-1600.
In the subsequent European colonization in Africa, India, China, etc. the ratio between the colonizers and the colonized was even more extreme. By the time the East India Company had taken control over most of the Indian subcontinent, its administrative functionaries (~1,500 men) ruled 300 million souls. I've just finished reading a book on the East India Company's takeover (The Anarchy, by William Dalrymple) and it is kind of mind-boggling to try and process how a few men in dingy offices in London can effect the conquest of a region so much vaster in wealth and population. It's hard to nutshell exactly what caused the "Great Divergence"; there are various ideas, namely with respect to the burgeoning industrial revolution, Enlightenment principles of rationalism and liberalism, and the revolutions in military science (both theoretical and technological). But I think it is important to stress that it was not for the most part Englishmen who conquered India, but rather largely Indians assembled, trained, and organized by Englishmen. Other colonial takeovers were similar to varying degrees; they tended to be small European expeditionary forces that, once landed, trained and organized local forces to do the bulk of the conquest/occupation. Which I think is getting more along to the point you were wondering about: what changed?
Nationalism is the easy answer, if somewhat of a simplification. In some cases it is less nationalism and some other method of pan-identification, but the principle is simple: Europeans were able to leverage significant technological advantages wielded by small groups of men to exert control over massive numbers of people because most of those people did not care who they were ruled by. In fact, when intervening in regional affairs, many groups would prefer to have foreigners be in charge rather than their rival; especially ones so self-evidently powerful. Why would some tribe in Gabon prefer to stand in solidarity with the tribe next to them they've warred with for a thousand years, instead of the guys with Maxim guns? If you're some local noble in the Laotian highlands what does it matter to you if you're ruled from Paris instead of Hue? And if you're a peasant why care at all as long as the harvests are good?
This is the kind of thing you could write 100k words on easily and not get anywhere so I'm trying to keep things simple. Before mass literacy there is no mass politics, there is no nationalism, there is no reason to care about the guy 30 km down the road, there's no reason to worry about who rules over you except for how it matters to the here and now. There is no class consciousness, there is no sense that you, a farmer, has more in common with a farmer a few towns over than the priests or tanners or dyers who live in your town.
Why didn't Indians unite against the British? Because they didn't know they were Indian. Various polities tried to cobble together anti-British alliances with the help of the French (the most successful being a Maratha-Mysore pact that inflicted a few crushing defeats). But this was all elite squabbling. There was no larger identity to draw on.
Now there are other elements here. These different forms of colonialism wasn't all that profitable in the end; go have a look at the GDP per capita rankings of western European nations and look how neatly it fits to their colonial pasts. Would the USA want to colonize the Philippines or Liberia like it did in the past? Would France really retake Algeria if it could? The west is still plenty able to extract wealth out of these places without requiring armies and colonial administrations. And we could if we really wanted play at war in these regions. We could kill millions. But it would be brutality with little benefit, and a lot of international backlash.
johnfabian
5mo ago
This is not really a cynical take, it is what our officials out-and-out say: the purpose for immigration is cheap labour and keeping up housing prices.
Building new cities does not work towards those goals. Shoving 500k new people every year into the GTA does.
johnfabian
1yr ago
I'm in 100%, total agreement with you, as a big fan of the book and someone very interested in the world wars. I've mentioned before here that the depiction of the Germans as over-eager in the final days of the war isn't just a baffling reversal of the book's finish, but also likely to give the average viewer the completely wrong impression about what the German morale and position was like come November 1918.
Over time I've become less and less tolerant for movies that take historical liberties. I don't really care about names or places or specific dates, or getting all the period details of dress and costume and dialogue correct. But the average person should be able to get, emotionally and intellectually, a roughly accurate impression of the era depicted. The average person knows fuck all about history EXCEPT for what they get from pop culture, and so in that respect I do feel that film/tv/video game creatives have some responsibility to get the broad stuff right. In an age of decreased literacy they do shoulder more of the burden (extremely sadly) for explaining history. And I think it's much more important that the larger public have a decent sense of our shared history than most people would reckon.
johnfabian
1yr ago
I read the article and found it all amusing. I'm all for auteur-driven storytelling, but it seems at Amazon they want it both ways - they want their shows about niche interests to have massive budgets and be tentpole hits. This queer baseball comedy cost >$10 million per episode to make; that's blockbuster TV territory, not what you pay for a single creative vision.
I'm no fan of The Big Bang Theory, but if you actually want a show to hit that kind of viewership yeah, maybe you do need to play to the common man. And if not maybe you need a way to control costs. Amazon seems to want to have the prestige of HBO, and thinks that spending a couple billion dollars oughta do it. But HBO didn't become HBO through financial largesse. They had a very deliberate vision of what they wanted to be.
johnfabian
11mo ago
If not for knowing how the subject brings out resident contrarians, I would be half inclined to think this is another rdrama experiment. I'm willing to indulge a bit then.
Only, I cannot fathom how anyone sees this when they look at Hitler. Here was a man who sincerely held the best interests of his People in his heart. He came of age in a time when his nation was — historical aggression notwithstanding — brutally, horrifically, oppressed. Countless of his countrymen, women and children, starved to death needlessly under spiteful, vindictive post-war Allied blockades. The economy was so saddled with reparation debt that rebuilding would take generations if it were ever possible at all. The people had no hope. Men and women who wanted families faced down a seemingly-insurmountable challenge in doing so. The risk of watching their babies die of starvation was all too real. And what chance had those children of decent lives even if they did survive to adulthood? They would end up de facto slaves, servants to the sneering foreigners who now controlled everything.
I think you're getting something here. I think you're a bit confused about some of the details - post-war Allied blockades starving Germans? But I think you're broadly correct that the hunger Germans experienced in the last year of the war was a very impactful historical trauma. I know how a similar hunger in '44-45 shaped the worldview of my grandfather. All questions of morality become mooted when you have a tangible sense of genuine food insecurity that most westerners can't even dream of. There have been a number of books written on exploring food insecurity as the driving cause of the mass violence in Eastern Europe from 1918-1945, (Black Earth by Timothy Snyder is one I've read), and I think it's a useful lens.
I would disagree that Hitler "held the best interests" of Germans at heart. He had a sort of egomaniacal view of Germans; they were great when they were bringing his visions to loftier heights, but when they proved unable to win the wars he started he was quite spiteful. He of course privately disparaged Christianity and various other traditional elements of German culture in private, but really I don't see how you can reconcile some unselfish love for the German people with his behaviour in 1944-45. He would've gladly condemned every last man, woman and child to oblivion for the failure to see through his designs.
(Also for the record the Soviets did not kill more people than the Nazis, let alone "so many more.")
Hitler seems to me, at heart, a very good father. If I emulated him, I should not hesitate to feed my own child first, even upon the corpses of my neighbors’ children. I should lie and cheat and steal and murder in game-theoretically optimal ways to bestow upon my children as many resources as possible, that they should not themselves end up in chains or on the dinner plate. The notorious Fourteen Words — “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” — make the connection so explicit and unassailable that the Left dares not to look upon it.
Hitler was willing to send endless Germans to die in Russia for him. He was willing to very literally to throw the lives of young boys away so that he might live a few days more. He set Germany against the world in a crusade for his own vanity. You interpret his actions as being meant to save Germany, but no one more than him worked to bring about its destruction. It was his actions that literally split Germany in two. Hell, if not for the threat of the Soviets you hold as the real evil who knows how far the retribution might have gone; the Morgenthau Plan gives you an inkling of to what extremes the United States might have gone to to prevent the rise of another like him.
The grand irony is that you are projecting all these kindly, fatherly attributes on to Hitler as a contrast to your "degenerate" enemies in the present. Yes, those debased products of modernity whose faults you neatly list: childless, infertile, more caring to dogs than humans, emotionally unsuitable to raise a family, and not even respectful of borders! It was here especially that I was wondering whether this was one big prank, but because you didn't add that they were all short-tempered drug addicts convinced of their own intellectual superiority I figured you must be genuine.
"Root causes" are excuses to do nothing
I've written before about the problems facing the TTC, Toronto's public transit system (examples from here: 1 and less directly 2). I'm a big transit advocate, think cities built around the automobile are awful, and car dependency is a big cause in western social malaise. Yada yada yada, you can fill in the rest. The problem I have is that my supposed brothers-in-arms on the transit crusade seem to think it's optional that transit actually be safe, clean, and enjoyable; this has been hashed and rehashed before so to put it simply my views are that if you want transit to work, you cannot tolerate anti-social behaviour on it.
Last week a 16 year-old boy was stabbed to death in a random, unprovoked attack. The assailant was a homeless man who was out on probation for multiple charges, including most recently a sexual assault two weeks prior, and had previously been issued weapons bans and ordered to take mental health counselling. You can imagine the response: various flavours of outraged, upset, sad, conciliatory, exhausted, in all their various permutations as they slithered through the filter of ideology.
The next day a mass shooting happened in the US, which has been picked over for its culture war nuggets already. But in the periods both before and after the killer's atypical identity was revealed, it reminded me very much of the reaction to the stabbing the day before. There is a certain type of person, who when confronted with an incident that they (consciously or not) are intelligent enough to realize might clash with their worldview, employs a kind of motte-and-bailey to defend it. They cannot outwardly exclaim that "This changes nothing!" in the aftermath of a tragedy, because it would appear cruel, heartless, or at the very least tonedeaf. Instead they insist that the real root of the problem is some vast, society-wide, rooted-in-the-depths issue that has to be tackled first. An obvious example is that (almost) every time there is a mass shooting in the US, 2nd amendment types all of a sudden become very concerned about the mental health of the nation, and proclaim it to be the fundamental cause of the problem that must be addressed before anything else changes. Now in general I'm actually very receptive to this line of argument; I think it is mostly a social/mental health problem. Again this has all been re-litigated a thousand times, but these kind of mass shootings are mainly a product of the last 25 years, and countries other than the US seem to have little issue mixing widespread gun ownership with low rates of gun crime.
But obviously this argument is an excuse to do nothing. These people care not one whit about mental health all the other days of the year, and if they were so serious about the problem in the first place maybe there would be a means to achieve some kind of reasonable restrictions on gun ownership that would, if not prevent mass shootings, at least stop them from being so damn easy.
Likewise, I've seen dozens of similar sentiments in the past week explaining the deep-seated causes of why a mentally ill homeless man randomly killed a teen: it's due to the federal government no longer funding social housing, it's due to a lack of compassion for the dehoused, it's about a lack of community, and of course We All Know it's really about capitalism itself. OK, great. But these all feel like excuses to do nothing. This kind of random violence on the subway wasn't an issue before COVID. Do we have to wait for ten years of elevated federal housing funds to act? Do we have to rebuild social trust first? Do we have to dismantle the corporations of the Laurentian Elite into worker co-ops before we do a goddamn thing? I like the sound of all these ideas, but I think there are more direct and immediate ways to prevent kids from getting murdered, so how about we do those first!
But of course the people voicing these sentiments don't actually want those actions taken. Or perhaps really, they perceive that those actions being taken might vaguely benefit the social and political capital of groups they don't like, and so construct an excuse to oppose them.
The bridge near me used to be suicide capital of Toronto. In North America it was second only to the Golden Gate Bridge as a venue for people to end their lives. So in 2006, the suicide nets went up, and there's only been one death since. I wonder whether if that solution was proposed today if we'd get the same kind of inane pushback: no, first we have to tackle the opioids, or too much screen time, or cyber-bullying, or whatever the root cause of the problem was. The nets are ugly: not only as a reflection of our society's problems, they also get in the way of a good view. But it would've been cowardly inaction to insist the root cause of the problem had to be solved first.
johnfabian
6mo ago
KSR is a sort of utopian Marxist, and so he very much thinks that technological advancement is married inextricably with social and cultural change (similar to another sci-fi great, Iain Banks). This makes for some very interesting science fiction because his future societies are not merely the 21st century, but in spaaaaaaace. He's an interesting author to read through the decades because the futures he writes about shift as the technology and culture of his own time shifts. I might write a short thing in the culture war thread about one specific element of this
johnfabian
1yr ago
The most fun/silly culture war argument in a while: STOVES!
Hey, did you hear the Democrats are coming for your gas stoves? Variations on that were the instigation of a bizarre culture war spat last week. Apparently some government official speculated about banning gas stoves because of health concerns, and that started the now-predictable cycle of "No, you're wrong!" bouncing around social media. I saw various reactions to this in different spaces and they were interesting in the way they were filtered through the various political lenses. In the US gas stoves are mainly a blue-state / higher-end restaurant phenomenon, so I found the conservative media response to be a bit baffling because it's not really their fortress under assault here. On the other hand saw lots of bourgeois PMC foodies declaring that you would only take their gas stoves from charred, dead hands.
I'm a hobbyist cook. I love trying new foods, experimenting with new recipes, and making food for friends and family. I'm the one who gets chained to the stove all through Christmas time (I like it though). So I found this a refreshingly fun (amid the inherent stupidity) culture war. My short opinion, having cooked with both gas and electric (rare to have gas in Canada); average gas stoves are better than average electrics, but among better ranges it depends what you want to do. I have a nice electric stove right now and I reckon I prefer it to gas because it is a lot more powerful which helps for high-temperature cooking (good for meat, Chinese food), and also is more constant at low temperatures (I make a lot of soft-scrambled eggs). But gas generally has much finer temperature control which is very practical for restaurant applications and to a certain extent rewards higher skill in a cook.
Gas does have real health/environmental implications. Yes, good ventilation goes a long way to preventing serious health risks, but it's not nothing. And gas is much less efficient energy-wise; not only does it shed a lot of heat in the energy transfer to the cooking vessel, it's in general less efficient than electric (but often cheaper depending on your locale). How much these considerations weigh against the legitimate reasons people have for preferring gas for cooking depends on the individual. But certainly people resent a top-down government intervention to force them to change their preference, and are skeptical of the reasoning presented.
But you know what this really reminds me of? The hot culture war debate of 20 years ago: incandescent lightbulbs vs. fluorescents. I've mentioned this a few times before here, but it's one of those culture wars that just disappeared, and I think many people would be genuinely forgetful or surprised if you brought it up to them now. It was a big thing at the time: as a kid I would remember reading the op-ed section of the newspaper and see endless letters to the editor about how using incandescent bulbs were our God-given right or you were a heartless rapist of the earth if you didn't immediately switch to fluorescents. The breakdown of that culture war was pretty simply liberal/conservative (should be obvious which side was which), whereas this one doesn't align people so neatly. But what the real comparison to the present is what ended the previous culture war: a new technology came along that made both previous ones (and their partisans) obsolete. LEDs ended up just being simply superior to both in every way. Progress ended the culture war.
Enter: induction cooking. It's electric. No particulate emissions. It's extremely powerful. It has fantastic temperature control. It's getting cheaper. You can have a traditional range, or just a hotplate: it's flexible and scalable. It's much safer, both for risk of burns and for starting fires. The only downside is that some existing cookware isn't compatible with it (you need ferrous metals in your vessel for it to work).
My prediction is that by the end of the decade induction replaces all gas stoves and most electrics. And twenty years later people will be bemused and embarrassed that we had such a silly argument over this.
johnfabian
5mo ago
Another detail: maybe the biggest obstacle to securing a murder conviction is if you don't have the weapon. If you shoot someone in broad daylight, there's a logic to doing it with a cheap weapon you then immediately throw into the deepest, darkest hole you can find.
johnfabian
7mo ago
I don't think the compact was the same. Psychologically-speaking, the United States had lived through decades of peace. An attack by an outside enemy on the homeland was practically unthinkable. It was not the covenant of the government of the day to prevent something that was unimagineable and unpredictable (at least to the average citizen). This was why in part the American bloodlust after 9/11 was so extreme.
By contrast Israel has been under a siege mentality their entire existence, and after 1973 the threat shifted from outside state actors and their conventional armies to terrorism. The threat of the Second Intifada in particular was that violent death could visit any Israeli at any time. The border wall, the Iron Dome, the hostage trades; the government of Israel (under various parties) has undertaken immense cost and effort to save the lives of handfuls of citizens. I'm not sure there's been another government so willing to spend money to save the life of the individual at the margin (at least at the hands of their enemies).
johnfabian
1yr ago
It just all seems so ugly. Most people have poor taste so radical self invention will be mostly just ugliness like architecture ripped from its patrimony and place. If politics ultimately springs from aesthetics, this liberalism is eventually doomed (but not before it wins and destroys what little of left of pre-modern life).
I've wondered whether I should make some kind of post about why neoliberal (so to speak) visions are so ugly. Like when the Soviets or Nazis dreamed big they dreamed a perfect world, where people were strong and brave and smart and beautiful. (nevermind the pile of corpses just out of frame)
But then you compare that with whatever the hell this is. This was a Green poster for the most recent German election. Forget about whether or not it's feasible. Their idea of a utopia is just ugly (and never mind all the weird elements that frankly make it look like a far-right parody of what a liberal would want)
Liberals at the moment seem very bad at articulating what kind of a world they want to create. More and more I wish the Soviet Union hadn't fallen; we've just gotten so pathetically complacent without a rival ideology
From what I remember from summer 2021 mostly the former. They were typically churches on or near rural reserves, and in general indigenous Canadians are more church-going than your average Canadian of European descent. One of the amusing results of this was that indigenous elders tended to be much more outspoken against the church burnings (some links: 1, 2, 3), while you practically had to drag condemnations out of Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh (leaders of the major center and center-left parties, respectively).
There were a few exceptions, like an Egyptian Coptic church that was targeted, or a Vietnamese church..
johnfabian
1yr ago
This is only tangentially related, but this reminds me of a comment on reddit the other day about how public art is often divorced from a practical purpose, meaning that ultimate finished product is bizarre and unsettling even if it is executed well.
I read The Left Hand of Darkness earlier this year and was sort of surprised to see the amount of reading into it of exploration of trans topics. To me the novel did not really address what I could recognize as transgender/sexual themes. Rather Le Guin seemed much more interested in exploring masculinity/femininity as social constructs, and how a culture might be affected without "true" masculinity/femininity. Besides the toying with the reader of seeing the characters as male by default, the introspection seemed mostly to focus on what the cultures lacked in their essence by not being sexually dimorphic. E.g., Karhide is a society that simultaneously lacks female affection and childrearing, but also male obsession and capacity for war.
Maybe I have a sort of inherent bias against reading things as trans metaphors, but some of the reflections I read afterwards trying to tie the novel to contemporary trans politics seemed like rather clear misreads of the novel to me. Just my impression
More options
Context Copy link